Cultural Semiotics for Digital Media

A Methodological Proposal

Abstract

Media always represented a privileged field of study in semiotics, allowing for specific research projects to grow, like Media Semiotics (Eugeni, 2010) or New Media Semiotics (Cosenza, 2014). In this paper, I will firstly give a general description of what we mean with digital media (Ferraro, 2016; Eugeni, 2015; Finocchi, 2014; D’armenio, 2019), and will then try to show how and why integrating the semiotic glance with a cultural analysis of digital media – platforms, technology and social media alike – is necessary. I will argue that digital media can be analysed not only in their textual and experiential dimension, but also as complex translation networks in which subjects co-constitute as such in relation to one another. I will then point out methodological indications for a cultural semiotics (Lorusso, 2010) of digital media, in order to retrace the encyclopaedical dimension that underlie digital text production (Paolucci, 2020). If we move from digital texts to digital discourse, we will be able to find the cultural models (Ferraro, 2014) and codes (Eco, 1975; Fabbri, 1973) in order to enrich the glance with which semiotics approaches media.