Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics as a contribution to media ecology

Abstract

Abstract The article is devoted to the scientific legacy of a famous Soviet literary and culture scholar and semiotician, Yuri Lotman. Authors consider that many of Lotman’s ideas bring him together with the field of media ecology. Lotman’s cultural semiotics approach could in general be reduced to the formula ‘the medium is the text’. According to his studies the whole culture could be seen as a text that has interdependent ideas and structures. Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere, or dynamic inhomogeneous semiotic space, the cause and the result of culture, is analysed in the final part of the article. The main semiosphere features, which include two types of the text structure (binary and ternary) and two types of the cultural dynamics (progress and explosion), are depicted. We consider that the concept of the semiosphere is fruitful for further research of complicated and multilevel media environment.