Technosemiotics: research network and resource centre
Many discourses today portray technologies such as artificial intelligence systems (AIS) as something abstract and immaterial. Techno-utopian imaginaries obscure the global material implications of AIS, benefitting from the anthropomorphic framing and hiding the true cost of AIS. By choosing to value AIS as anthropomorphic entities, we are simultaneously choosing to devalue the people, cultures and environments implicated in AIS as envirotechnical systems.
What is technosemiotics?
Technosemiotics is the study of how meanings are created, transmitted, restructured and interpreted by semiotic agents through voluntary use of or being affected by technologies, or the study of ideas about these processes.
Science and Technology Studies and environmental humanities draw attention to societal, environmental, and material aspects of technologies. Technosemiotics complements STS and EH perspectives with conceptual frameworks from cultural, social, and ecosemiotics. A major theoretical challenge is re-grounding AIS in materiality and semiotics. Ecosemiotics offers a realist view, recognising the interplay of nature and society on both communicative and material level (see Tønnessen 2020: 91).
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