Can Semiotics Survive the Petabytes Era?
The main stock of semiotics – its epistemological substance so to speak – consists of a set of models that were constructed in order to account for small data samples. First efforts to bring some conceptual order in the diffuse if not confuse realm of symbolic behavior were most likely driven by survival needs. These efforts were grounded in natural semiotics, a basic pragmatic competence that allows adaptive inferences and anticipations. Semiotic behavior is indeed constrained by the necessity of correctly and quickly interpreting the moods and intentions of preys and predators as well as other humans based on limited information. This also applies to the obscure signs that were assumed to be given by the gods in response to human anxiety toward the future. No doubt this latter concern was at first closely related to reading the nature and progress of illnesses. Historically, various speculative systems were constructed, notably when the data samples became greatly expanded through co
