Digital Media and Semiotics: Uncovering Myths to Understand How the Way We Communicate is Changing

This series of research stories told by young researchers was born from the PhD Storytelling initiative, which brought together doctoral candidates with science communication experts from the University of Bologna and professionals from UGIS (Italian Union of Scientific Journalists). The author of this article is Marco Giacomazzi, PhD graduate in Philosophy, Science, Cognition and Semiotics

Imagine being in a vast library. Among thousands of books, you find one out of place, with an illegible cover and no bibliographic details. You start leafing through its pages, trying to figure out what it is about. It seems to be a collection of stories, but there are no indexes or numbered chapters. It could be non-fiction or fiction: without any information about its context or the circumstances in which it was written, you can only make assumptions, without confirming any of them.

The digital revolution has brought challenges for social and political life because it has so quickly reshaped the social and cognitive conditions of communication. We find ourselves immersed in an information-saturated landscape without clear signposts to guide us, where the distinction between public and private space is increasingly blurred. What are the consequences for our way of communicating? Take email: the way we write it results from the interplay between the possibilities offered by the medium and the communicative conventions we have collectively adopted.

This is precisely what semiotics deals with. It studies our communicative processes, asking how it is possible for gestures, objects, words, or texts to make sense. My research at the University of Bologna investigates digital communication and the forms of interaction we adopt online. While it cannot be said that our cognitive and communicative processes are determined by the tools we use, we also cannot claim that these tools play no role at all.

There is no evidence that smartphones, the internet, or social media, by themselves, make us more distracted or less empathetic. Yet today we know that tools shape perception and memory. Social and cognitive sciences tell us that the design of a technological object is never neutral—nor is the way we approach it. The signs that surround us act as anchors for our memory, and under certain conditions they must be considered part of our cognitive processes. Although we usually think of memory as something located in our heads, in reality we rely heavily on a network of objects around us to remind us of what we need to do, by when, and for what purpose. Technology is not external to human beings, as the history of Homo sapiens teaches us. Each innovation reshapes the basic conditions of our knowledge and our coexistence, as well as their temporal and spatial dimensions.

Precisely because technology is part of being human, we cannot think of the digital transition as something beyond our control. As noted earlier, forms of communication depend on tools, on our cognitive and perceptual faculties, and on social conventions. These three processes must always be considered in parallel.

“Ceci tuera cela”: in Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo has Frollo utter these words while pointing first to a book and then to the Paris cathedral. The modern novel will kill the cathedral; secular knowledge will replace the role of the religious institution in transmitting knowledge to the masses. Umberto Eco, a leading figure in Italian semiotics, liked to cite this passage when discussing the relationship between printed books and the internet—not so much to emphasise a rupture, but rather to highlight continuity.

A “new” medium does not erase the previous one but integrates into society, bringing with it both innovations and constants. Consider the role of social media platforms in the circulation of news. The term disintermediation is usually taken to mean that traditional mediators of information in the public sphere—such as newspapers or institutions—have lost their role, leaving end users free and direct access to information, which in turn has fuelled the spread of fake news. But is this really the case? Are readers themselves responsible for misinformation? Or have new, different mediators emerged whose functioning we do not yet fully understand? Can we say that the type of competence—both social and technical—that Tullio De Mauro regarded as essential for democracy, namely literacy, has changed?

This is why semiotics studies phenomena that take into account our cognitive and social processes, such as user experience, relating them to texts—such as those of digital journalism—and to media history. Such research serves multiple purposes, involving both public and private stakeholders: first and foremost, integrating research results into the framework of media education, thereby strengthening literacy programmes already active at national and European level. Moreover, the critical insights of semiotics can also be applied to the design of media environments, their interfaces, and their design principles.

Looking to the immediate future, the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the ways it is gradually being integrated into our daily lives raise new needs for research and critical reflection. Meaning emerges through collaborative processes, based on a shared background of common knowledge. At what level will embedded AI in our devices intervene? How can we prevent its misuse? How can we design collaboration with these tools without falling into the traps of digitalisation?