GLOBALIZATION – A SEMIOTIC APPROACH
GLOBALIZATION – A SEMIOTIC APPROACH

Summary/Abstract: The key element that redefines the community in the present intercultural context is the one that actually reshapes the intercultural context itself – globalization. Globalization already represents the big picture which integrates every intercultural context, it is the global text which encompasses every partial context, local and regional. Yet, globalization is not a new concept: universalist tendencies, urges and visions can be traced down even on the eve of human civilization. From the civilizing expeditions, more or less mythical, born from the human spirit of knowledge and/or adventure, to the theoretical reflections of the first thinkers who posed the problem of universal, the human being has been concerned about more and more comprehensive wholes. What is now new with globalization is that it is really happening, that it is a reality more and more tangible, pregnant and obvious: it is a fact. But globalization is not only a physical reality - economic, financial, military and so on - it is also a (new) mental reality, a (new) semantic frame and a (new) cultural unity, as Umberto Eco defines it. And this reality, too – and all that belongs to it –, as all realities that populate the individual and collective mental, is conveyed by signs. Given these premises, this work seeks to address globalization from a semiotic perspective, which would comprise a componential (or semic) analysis and on the other hand a symbology, a symbol analysis of the imagery that globalization raises.

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