Abstract
The concept of reasonability is key in Umberto Eco’s interpretive semiotics, where it enables the formation of a community of interpreters that avoids both extremes of fundamentalism and anarchy. Such concept, however, is not immune from the technological infrastructure in which interpretation takes place. In the digital sphere, the notion itself of community is deeply altered as a consequence of fundamental change in the very nature of connectedness and connections among members. Whereas in the pre-digital world, semantic communality would ground connectedness and the ensuing communities, in digital social networks syntactic communities prevail, where clusters of members emerge out of contagion and memetic force more than through sharing of actual semantic content. The passage from semantic to syntactic connectedness deeply affects the nature of communities and the ways in which they find cohesion. In the digital world, communities are not only syntactic more than semantic, but also quantitative more than qualitative, and negative more than positive: they take shape around what they oppose, more than around what they propose. The market is a fundamental force behind the technological framework of such new communities, since it engineers them so as to both monitor them and profit by their constant litigiousness.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Leone, Massimo. 2014. Semiotica dello slancio mistico. In Estasi/Ecstasy, monographic issue of Lexia, 15-16, ed. Massimo Leone, 219–284. Rome: Aracne.
Certeau, Michel de. 1982. La fable mystique: XVIe-XVIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard; Engl. trans. 1992. The mystic fable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; to be compared with utopias of universal languages, see Leone 2019 (3).
Leone, Massimo. 2019. The Search for the Imperfect Language”. Semiotica 231: 105–119. https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2018-0051.
Natale, Simone, and Diana Pasulka (eds.). 2020. Believing in Bits: Digital media and the supernatural. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plotke, Seraina. 2017. Semantic traces of social interaction from antiquity to Early modern times: historical conversation. Engl. trans. by Laura Radosh. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Leone, Massimo. 2020. Apuntes para una semiótica de la frontera. Revista chilena de semiótica 12: 7–22.
Stutz Steppacher, Daia Paco. 2013. Alps as process: Engaging montane Switzerland as an operating urban Ecology. Thesis (Advisor, Pierre Bélanger), Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design. Harvard University, Graduate School of Design.
Attali, Jacques. 2017. Histoires de la mer. Paris: Fayard.
Friedman, Louis. 2015. Human spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Leone, Massimo (ed.). 2009. Actants, actors, agents: The meaning of action and the action of meaning; from theories to territories. Monographic issue of Lexia, new series, 3–4. Rome: Aracne.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Leone, M. The Limits of Digital Interpretation: Semantic Versus Syntactic Connectedness. Int J Semiot Law 33, 969–982 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09726-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09726-5