Digital Media in Semiotic Research in Italy

This essay retraces how the internet and the digital media in general have been approached by semiotics in Italian studies. The essay begins by noting that many of the issues arising from the advent of the digital communication, such as the dialectics among “apocalyptic and integrated”, the role attributed to technology in the process of the transformation of societies and the debate over the models of knowledge (eg. Eco’s remarks on the tree as a metaphor of knowledge as opposed to the labyrinth or on the limits of the interpretation) were discussed and already on the agenda of the discipline several years before the diffusion of the internet. Then, it deals with the first studies on digital artefacts, mostly focused on the communicative aspects of websites and their interfaces, as well as on the novelty represented by the “short texts” disseminated in new media (banners, clips, gifs etc.). After that, it shows how, starting from the studies of Floch ([1995] 2000), the discourse over digital media matures and produces a vast series of essays covering the socialisation processes on the web and in social networks. In such a scenario, the web is less a “topic” to be examined than an environment to be investigated in search of specific forms of interactions occurring in specific discourses (politics, marketing, food etc.).