Technological futures in semiotics: The year 2024 in review
Technological futures in semiotics: The year 2024 in review

Summary/Abstract: Our reading of the 2024 Semiotica and Sign Systems Studies (henceforth SSS) volumes identifies six overarching topics, which suggest an alignment of semiotic theory with the greater transition in the humanities and social sciences towards new materialism and situated cognition. This has to do with the reforming of academic discourses within the current technological revolution – an orientation that we identify in scholarship, but which we also choose as the optics for this overview. We emphasize that the effort we try to make in this review consists in looking at contemporary semiotic research in awareness of not merely scholarly trends and whims, but also of a profound and unfolding technological revolution. Of course, we do not claim to see very far ahead. Nobody can tell where still emerging computational media technologies are taking society and academia, nor which recent scholarly inquiries are but passing trends and which will endure as disciplines. We are inspired by John Deely’s (2001: xxx) discussion in the opening of his monumental treatise on the history of semiotics in which he writes that “the interval between past and future, the present, is long enough for us to work some matters out and perhaps even contribute together to what will be the heritage of the past for those future inquirers who are not yet part of our present”.

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