Meaning in the Age of Big Data

Abstract

The most fascinating semiotic applications of recent years came not from semioticians but from those who practice semiotics without knowing they do so (what the author calls the Monsieur Jourdain syndrome). Military and surveillance applications, genome sequencing, and the practice of phenotyping are immediate examples. The entire domain of digital computation, now settled in the big data paradigm, provides further proof of this state of affairs. After everything was turned into a matter of gamification, it is now an exercise in data acquisition (as much as possible) and processing at a scale never before imagined. The argument made in this chapter is that semiotic awareness could give to science and technology, in the forefront of human activity today, a sense of direction. Moreover, meaning, which is the subject matter of semiotics, would ground the impressive achievements we are experiencing within a context of checks-and-balances. In the absence of such a critical context, the promising can easily become the menacing. To help avoid digital dystopia, semiotics itself will have to change.