The Limits of Digital Interpretation: Semantic Versus Syntactic Connectedness

Abstract

The concept of reasonability is key in Umberto Eco’s interpretive semiotics, where it enables the formation of a community of interpreters that avoids both extremes of fundamentalism and anarchy. Such concept, however, is not immune from the technological infrastructure in which interpretation takes place. In the digital sphere, the notion itself of community is deeply altered as a consequence of fundamental change in the very nature of connectedness and connections among members. Whereas in the pre-digital world, semantic communality would ground connectedness and the ensuing communities, in digital social networks syntactic communities prevail, where clusters of members emerge out of contagion and memetic force more than through sharing of actual semantic content. The passage from semantic to syntactic connectedness deeply affects the nature of communities and the ways in which they find cohesion. In the digital world, communities are not only syntactic more than semantic, but also quantitative more than qualitative, and negative more than positive: they take shape around what they oppose, more than around what they propose. The market is a fundamental force behind the technological framework of such new communities, since it engineers them so as to both monitor them and profit by their constant litigiousness.