Paul Bouissac

Space has more than three dimensions. Our sense of space is generated by movement, that is, by time. But space is foremost a multimodal experience: visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, and gustative. There is also an inner dimension when we feel parts of our body aching or enjoying pleasure. This inner space, however, is not the “outside” space we perceive through vision, touch, sounds (like resonance and echo), and smell (which can be close and concentrated, or remote and diluted). The “objective” visual space which is constructed by classical geometry, topology, and traditional geography inspires countless metaphors through which we try to make sense of whatever escapes the net of visual perception. But an essential dimension of space is missing from all these different modes of apprehension: the space we live in is emotional or “affective” as some geographers now prefer to say. In real life there is no experience of space that cannot be described as a feeling: familiarity, boredom, arousal, anxiety, and many other kinds of fleeting affective moments. Space is indeed primarily subjective. It takes some intellectual effort to construct a detached approach to space.

Semiotics is not purely a matter of philosophical and scientific theorization. It is also a culture of inquiry, exploration, and discovery. It is a state of mind which prompts us to question what we take for granted, to break away from disciplinary fences, and to connect dots which had seemed so far unbridgeable. Probing the senses of space is an urgent agenda for the semiotic project.

This issue of SemiotiX features two such pragmatic probes. They are both concrete experiences rife with theoretical implications. In the Guest Column, Dylann McLean questions the conception of space which prevails in her discipline (“a surface with cultures, people, and places spread out upon”). With other contemporary geographers, she considers this image to be “unthought”. Her own experience as an urban clown, minimally masked (and protected) by her red nose, allows her to undo temporarily and permanently reveal at the same time the ideological constraints of the built environment through the practice of her art. The forms of space constructed by architects and city planners are ultimately designed to control our behaviour. These stolid casts preform itineraries in a predictable maze of boundaries. Functions and meanings are assigned to places. McLean shows how the “urban clown collective” of which she is a part transforms these structures into fluid experiences of the meaning of space. Her insightful column provides a point of entry into the new paradigm of affective geography.

The video above documents a similar process. It shows the transformative power of “out of place” performances upon our experience of the urban environment. Walter Siegfried is a distinguished opera singer and multimedia artist well-known for his large scale installations in cities and airports. I was fortunate to participate in one of his latest creations which occurred in Munich on September 8, this year. The public was invited to meet the artist on the platform of Hackerbrueck, an open air station in the city’s public transit network. About fifty people showed up at the scheduled time. Walter appeared walking down the stairs from the overpass bridge, equipped with two elegant loud speakers spreading from each side of his head like antlers or insect antennae. Other passengers were obviously wondering what this was, pretending not to pay much attention as city dwellers are wont to do. We followed him to the end of the platform and then, suddenly, having started the recorded accompaniment by pressing a key on the small black box he carried on his chest, he sang the first aria, struggling at times with rushing trains. The station platform instantly became the most innovative opera set. Beyond the aesthetic emotion carried by the voice, the lyrics, and the music, our functional perception of space was shattered, its surreal beauty revealed, and the semantics of platform, S-Bahn, and Hackerbruecke recast into a new poetic order.

For more than one hour, under a light, intermittent rain, we followed Walter Siegfried along an itinerary he had carefully planned; matching the arias of his repertory to the places he had chosen in order to achieve spatial transmutations through harmony, contrast, or irony. Some people dropped out; some joined us on their bicycles; passer-by were intrigued and stopped until an aria was over and, with an incredulous look, clapped their hands in appreciation of this out-of-place musical experience. We stopped under a derelict bridge, in the patio of a high-tech corporate head quarter where the performance was interrupted by security guards who claimed that we had triggered a general electronic alarm, in front of an Italian restaurant full of people eating pasta, and at the bottom of a pit on a construction site. The last aria was sung on the ascending escalator of the station from which most of us had to take their train home.

Paul Bouissac

Contemporary semiotics is rich in various models and methods which have clustered over the years to form hybrid descriptive tools. Most approaches are unashamedly eclectic and researchers usually engage in heuristics rather than in some normative logic of discovery such as those which are believed to characterize the empirical and formal sciences. Although a few semioticians confuse dogma and theory, most would probably agree that the field of semiotic research lacks a well established theoretical ground. This is probably why nobody has yet been able to produce a credible textbook in semiotics. Sub-domains of biology, psychology, and culture have been successfully probed using semiotic concepts and algorithms which had been first developed in philosophy, phenomenology, and linguistics. In some interesting ways, semiotics as it stands now is an art rather than a science. Like all great arts, though, it changes our perception of ourselves, our social and cultural environments, and even our cosmology through its uncanny capacity to describe in novel ways what we are taking for granted. This is, of course, an important step toward the counterintuitive knowledge that the scientific inquiry keeps ushering in since the beginning of the Enlightenment with amazing transformative power.

A region of intellectual effervescence like the free-wheeling speculations of today’s biosemiotics, which owe more to philosophy, if not theology, than to scientific inquiry, may be a precious epistemological commodity. Ideas sprouting from metaphors and word games can generate bold hypotheses without which research would stagnate. It is obvious that semioticians of all hues ask good questions even if the answers they offer generally fall short of expectations because they lack clarity and applicability. Cloaked in the garb of the philosophy of mind, they still dance around the black box. But this Dark Age is coming to an end. Two current developments will shortly bring light to the brain. It is not a stretch to predict that this will change semiotics, under any other name. A new dawn will rise when semiotics can proceed from the descriptive and speculative stage to the explanatory and predictive horizon.

First, a new generation of fundamental brain research is on the move. Connectomics has been coined after genomics because its goal is as ambitious as were the earlier attempts to map the human genome. It consists of mapping the neurons and their connectivity one by one in the whole brain. The Human Connectome Project received a $40 million grant last September from the National Institute of Health (USA). Several teams are busy developing the project at MIT, Harvard, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California in Los Angeles. The challenge is daunting and, expectedly, this mapping will first concern the brains of small mammals like the ubiquitous laboratory mice. The horizon, of course, is the human brain, at least a million-petabyte data set in the opinion of one of the leading scientists running the connectome project, a far cry from the current anatomical and functional mapping available to researchers and pathologists.

The second development, which has now reached the operational stage, is dubbed optogenetics. The last decade has witnessed dramatic advances in using photoreceptor proteins to selectively monitor and even control neural activity on a millisecond time-scale. Details on the history of this method (which was chosen as Method of the Year across all fields of science and engineering by the journal Nature Methods) are available in Wikipedia. It seems that the method literally brings the brain alight. Even hard-dyed dualists, who are increasingly toying with the notion of embodiment, will be curious to find out how the processes they dub signs or semiosis work, or do not work, when we can visualize the complex networks of micro-, if not nano-chain reactions which create and sustain what we still call meanings, ideas, and emotions.

This level of observation, experimentation, and representation will allow us, in the long run, to go beyond the delusional intuitions of natural phenomenology and commonsense logic which provide the root metaphors of contemporary semiotics. There is no doubt that these advances will usher in an epistemological revolution and a new understanding of life, society, and thought. Those who proposed, toward the end of the 19^th century, the first explicit agenda for a “science of signs” were well informed about the state of scientific knowledge in their time. Semiotics must take stock of today’s extraordinary advances in the understanding of the brain…or die.

Paul Bouissac

Can signs be toxic? Can there be killer signs, either because of their inherent properties or because of their sheer number?   Notwithstanding the claims of the modern avatars of Doctor Angelicus and Doctor Pangloss, signs might not be the benign and useful entities which perfuse the universe as utopian semiotics and its assumption of rational and functional harmony suggest. Obviously, in some circumstances, signs are adaptive through enabling the sharing of relevant information, whether by chance or by design, but they can also be tools of deceit and destruction in the context of biological and cultural competitive processes. The neat communication diagrams and reassuring metaphors which are at the root of the current semiotic discourse may account for only a very small part of the massive interface between information and organisms, a daunting entanglement from which life and society emerge and into which they eventually collapse.

Many enlightened observers have noted with puzzled anxiety how prone signs are to break free from their would-be masters’ intentions and wreck havoc among the social groups they often perniciously invade and manipulate to their own benefits. Actually, signs seem to know no master at all and run their own lives in complex combinations such as languages and ideologies variously and indifferently useful or deleterious to humans as well as to other organisms. In the form of vicious metaphors, ideas can destroy their ecological niches and blindly drive themselves and their environments to extinction.

The most insightful thinkers, who adumbrated possible theories of signs which were not predetermined by the constraints of their ideology or theology, pointed out this propensity of signs to follow their own obscure logic. Peirce endowed them with dynamic autonomy which he called semiosis, an unstoppable process that only death can terminate; Saussure inconclusively puzzled over the irrational and unpredictable changes in languages and other sign systems; the young Piaget claimed in a juvenile, mystical text, The Mission of the Idea (1915): “The Idea leads the world. Action is the servant of the Idea.” And he forcefully asserted, lest the reader would think that this was a metaphor: “The Idea is an organism, is born, grows, and dies like organisms, renews itself ceaselessly.” Some four decades ago this anxiety was articulated in the evolutionist idiom under a neologism (meme) which quickly gave rise to the would-be science of memetics whose credibility was quickly lost in the sensationalist discourse of best-selling philosophers. Many noted the uncanny conceptual kinship of memes and signs, viz. Terrence Deacon’s piece in The Semiotic Review of Books (1999, Vol. 10.3).

In the meantime, memes have gained currency in the popular press and in some professional spheres. Marketers devise “viral” strategies which consist of the stealth planting of ideas ahead of promotional campaigns. In the film industry, a movie like Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) exploited the idea of inseminating a mind (or a brain) with a program of action designed to control the behaviour of an individual toward a desirable goal. By contrast, the metaphor of “brain washing” involved earlier crude methods based on conditioning rather than the more subtle hypothetical science of memes. Conceived as algorithms, that is, finite sequences of formal instructions that when followed will terminate after a finite numbers of steps (see e.g., C.L. Foster’s Algorithms, Abstraction, and Implementation, 1992) and can replicate indefinitely with the possibility of errors and subsequent changes, both memes and signs are indifferent to the human notions of good and evil.

But irrespective of whether a behavioral algorithm is adaptive or not, excesses can be lethal. In spite of its astronomical number of connections, the multitasking brain is a finite organ that cannot be loaded without limits. It is adaptively selective and filters relevant information. When such relevant information is exponentially increased through artificial means or when its flow runs wild, semiosis can become the name of a terminal disease. Which individual human brain could absorb and functionally process the manifold petabytes of Wikileak-type assaults? Even specially designed hyper-organizations find it difficult to cope with uncontrolled swarms of signs. A title in The New York Times of January 17, 2011, reads: “In New Military, data overload can be deadly: raw information helps determine what targets to hit and what to avoid, but sometimes the data is overwhelming.”

Knowledge always advances through probing the status quo and raising scandalous questions. All too often semioticians of any hue have come through as utopian dreamers of an outdated pastoralist vision of life and thought. Perhaps this is why they have not been taken quite seriously by the disciplines which seriously confront our horizon of ignorance.

The SemiotiX mascot Hapax wishes you a Happy New Year (both solar and lunar)! Photo Credit: William Worhall

Paul Bouissac

“If indeed the fish will be the last to discover water, perhaps we can help ourselves by looking at some other species.” Jerome S. Bruner (in The Growth of Competence, K.Connolly & J.S.Bruner Eds. Academic Press, 1974, p.13)

One of the current frontiers of science is the geology and biology of the deep sea. Glimpses of the ocean floor show dramatic landscapes of mountain chains, profound valleys, tumultuous volcanic vents that are teeming with puzzling forms of life which have evolved in these extreme, photonless environments. Probes supported by advanced technologies have uncovered so far only an infinitesimal portion of the larger but unknown, invisible part of the planet earth. Figuratively, the deep sea may be an apt metaphor for the psychological unconscious. But, more concretely, its visual and physical impenetrability remains an absolute limit of our phenomenological knowledge: it is not only a thick, dark, and haunting dimension of our ignorance but also a cognitively alien universe which defeats the pretension of our solar intelligence. Even the scuba diver who merely explores the most superficial layers of the abyss soon encounters the opacity and ghostly solitude of the marine environment and needs to frequently resurface lest he or she loses consciousness and dies. The extraordinary films which have been made at the heavy cost of transporting light and equipment to depths that the sun cannot reach are artifices which translate and betray at the same time the logic of aquatic life and its daunting biosemiotic processes. Artifices of visualization have revealed exquisitely exuberant living patterns which must have been selected by other evolutionary constraints than vision.

Something humans will probably never be able to understand intuitively is the world our remote ancestors escaped when tetrapods ventured to the shores and shallows which marine predators could not reach. This is a world from which humans have been biologically and cognitively exiled. How powerless are humans in dealing with the depth of the sea was recently demonstrated by the BP catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

Indeed, inquisitive humans have evolved their sensorial and cognitive capacities as adaptations to the atmospheric, visible world. With lip service paid to multimodality, semiotics has theorized primarily the sounds and sights of our luminous environment, the range of waves which carves out our umwelt and that our brains pick out and process. We know, however, that life evolved from this liquid depth where signaling was bound to be primarily chemical and tactile until the photosensitivity of some organisms in the upper regions of the oceans triggered, some five hundred million years ago, the visual evolutionary arms race known as the Cambrian explosion. The evolution of vision in its many forms marked the progressive advent of the innumerable optical patterns which are endowed with meanings in the eyes of the beholders, each according to the scale of its sensorial adaptations. We can relate and interact with the inhabitants of the upper regions of the sea: mammals which returned to the aquatic milieu, colorful fishes and crustaceans, corals and glowing slugs, and a few other bioluminescent organisms. But deeper in the abyss, a self contained world, which all the energy of the earth would not suffice to illuminate, challenges our irrepressible drive to know, that is, to see, even if we are aware that this knowledge is biased by our sensory organs and largely the result of optical illusions. Atmospheric intuitions blind us to the fact that air and water are not as different from each other as our perceptual and semantic categories lead us to believe. Their continuum is counter-intuitive but real and the differences are a matter of degree involving the same elements in various combinations and proportions.

Observing and understanding life in the sea stretch to their limits our physical and semiotic competencies. The latter is what should concern us here because it is through pushing the categorical boundaries to the point where they burst or dissolve that we reach some revealing, counter-intuitive evidence. The semiotics of the logos implicitly equates air with immateriality but it is exactly what a cognitively evolved fish would think of the aquatic milieu to which it is adapted. Semiotically confronting the sea is bound to expose the “unthinkable” atmospheric constraints that have molded our theories of signs and communication. The deep sea radically challenges our epistemology. But it also challenges the pragmatics of adapting our semiotic competencies to a boundless, lightless liquid environment: how to communicate acoustically with each other? How to signal visually through gestures and facial expressions when we need underwater life-saving equipment as awkward as it is heavy? How to switch from the lesser resistance of air combined with the rules of gravity to the quasi weightlessness of the sea caused by our natural or artificial buoyancy? How to communicate with the multifarious forms of marine life and understand their semiotic web?

Although there does not exist, as far as I know, any department of semiotic engineering, this virtual discipline is a crucial aspect, under any other name, of many contemporary scientific and technological developments which require the encoding of meaning, the communication and encryption of information, the bridging of linguistic and cultural differences, and reaching out to the outer space as well as to the inner space of the oceans, to name only a few. Repairing or preventing ecological disasters, both on land and in the sea, also demands a precise knowledge of the ways in which semiotic webs sustain the flow of information without which life is not possible. There are, of course, practical dimensions for which some form of implicit semiotic engineering is ever present: diplomacy, advertising and marketing, the cosmetic industry, design and architecture, therapies of all kinds, user-friendly IT tools, and, last but not least, Internet social networking.

This is why SemiotiX will endeavour in 2011 to develop satellite websites whose purpose will be to bring these considerations to the fore in the hope that productive interfaces will emerge from the explicit confrontation of abstract semiotic models with the demands of practical goals in actual contexts. The abstract models of semiotics need to be put to the test and transformed as much as rules of thumb solutions must be elevated to true engineering by the inputs of comprehensive theories.

The first satellite website will be O.C.E.A.N.S [Observation, Conservation, Exploration, Appreciation, and News of the Sea]. It will include section such as Deep Sea Communication, Ocean Biosemiotics, Marine Archaeology, Conservation, Scuba Diving Exploration and Training, and abundant visual documentation. The next satellite website will concern the bridging of cultural differences and the semiotics of community construction. Another may address the elaboration of video games based on semiotic theories and aimed at higher education, and another on Style and Fashion. Suggestions for other satellite websites are welcomed.

During the past decade, 27,000 scientists from 80 nations have been busy compiling data concerning life in the world’s oceans in order to create the first Census of Marine Life. Through mining the literature and existing databases as well as engaging in fieldwork, they have discovered over 6,000 new species. As a result the number of known marine species stands now at 240,000, that is, approximately 25% of the total which is thought to exist on the planet earth. In an interview to Science (Vol. 330, 1 October 2010, p. 25), Ian Poiner, the chief executive of the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville and chair of the scientific steering committee since 2008, stated that although the census is a definite milestone many questions about ocean life remain unanswered. “The census found life everywhere we looked, and it is much more complex and interconnected than we expected” declared Poiner. A rich website provides a galore of information on this project and its results to date. http://www.coml.org . Another informative place is the website of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute http://www.mcbi.org . Among many sections of interest, the page devoted to the work of Sylvia A. Earle offers an exhilarating vista on a remarkable explorer of the sea and conservationist who has revealed many secrets of the Sea of Sargossum and its unique ecology. Earle has also published many books on her diving experience http://literati.net/Earle/sylvia-earle-books.htm ]. Another website of interest is www.BulBul.com (in Polish with many videos and photo albums).

[Hu]manatees

Photo by Zbigniew Roguszka

Manatees are the closest relatives to the elephants. Like all mammals which went back to sea, they spend their lives under the surface. They roam the sea near the coastlines, and in the rivers nearby, taking their breath from time to time.  They gracefully move around, munching on seaweeds, and watching marine life. They keep plenty of liquid space between each other. The diver comes across peaceful mums and their pups, chatting in infra sounds that human ears can’t catch. In the distance, fatter daddies strut along their buoyant stuff to fend off their rivals and impress their younger admirers. Humans can contemplate themselves in the manatees’ pensive and compassionate eyes.

Zbigniew Roguszka lives and works in Poland. He graduated in Geography at Adam Mickiewicz University. He is a scuba diver and free-lance photographer who travels all over the world in search of new scuba diving adventures. He documents in his photographs and videos natural landscapes and marine wild life. His articles on scuba diving have appeared in the main scuba diving magazine in Poland.

zbigniew.roguszka@gmail.com

Paul Bouissac

It is useful to be reminded from time to time that dogmas are the opium of intelligence. They literally stop the inquiry and put the critical mind to sleep or lead it to wander into wishful landscapes. It seems that semiotics has entered an epistemological coma. The whole discourse that is marketed under this name floats on a few unquestioned assertions that were inherited from a long-dead past, a time when human knowledge was greatly restricted both by the lack of investigative tools and by the power of metaphysical models. Much has changed over the last century and various efforts deployed for casting the new scientific knowledge in the old moulds of Scholastic concepts have consistently failed to impress those who toil on the frontlines of contemporary research.

Take the notion of “sign” for instance and its standard definitions in the semiotic heritage. It is a notion by default: in the absence of obvious explanations for some changes in the behaviour of organisms, subtle agents of transformation had to be assumed to be responsible for such changes which could not be intuitively assigned to obvious material causes. Hence the signs and their vicarious functions permeating the universe like shadows or fragments of the things themselves which cannot fly. Hence the signs as currency of the mind, pure values that fluctuate in the invisible stock exchange that rules over human fanciful fictions. Ultimately, there is little difference indeed between semiotics as it is practiced now and magic. It has no true predictive power but it is always possible to find examples of its efficacy ex post facto.

Upon reflection the standing-for mantra does not make sense except in the very restricted conditions of the creation of an encryption code. However, by an epistemological sleight of hand, it is the whole gamut of interactions and transformations among organisms which has been reduced to this model in the utopian universe of current semiotic discourse. The dogmatic definition of the cornerstone of semiotics is so general and unsubstantiated that there is no limit to what it may apply. If, as many have claimed, everything is a sign, then nothing is a sign. We have to get back to square one if we refuse to abide by this dogma. The wilful ignorance of what actually happens where it can only happen – that is, in the brain – is covered by a fancy word, semiosis, which puzzles those who are engaged in the painful task of disentangling the paths of information through a chaotically evolved neural jungle variously soaked with chemical neuro-transmitters.  How it works – or does not work as is often the case – is the real question which semioticians should address rather than singing their mantras that purport to explain everything but does not control anything.

But the great inquisitors of semiotics will thunder: “This is an abominable sin called reductionism”. What do they mean by this? Do they claim that it consists of explaining the complex by the simple? If so, it can be retorted that neuronal processes are far more complex than their dozen or so fuzzy and all-purpose philosophical notions. Do they mean that it reduces the spiritual to the physiological? Well, paying the slightest attention to this argument first requires that one accepts metaphysical dualism. Nobody should feel compelled to jump into this trap.  But if reductionism is understood as the heuristic necessity for scientific inquiry to downsize the big questions to chunks of well-defined manageable problems, then by all mean strategic reductionism is the most reasonable path to understanding the way in which organisms, humans in particular, make sense of their natural and social environments, and how they evolved the capacity to share (or hide) and preserve relevant information.

But no semiotic dogma is more conducive to epistemological somnolence than the coarse categorization of signs as index, icon, and symbol. These abstract notions have prompted centuries, if not millennia of controversies. This Hellenistic and Scholastic debate has not died out yet probably because of the force of inertia of the institutionalized discourse that carries in various Indo-European languages this mixture of Hellenic and Latin philosophical terms. After “the sign which stands for something else”, this is what students of semiotics are taught to believe. Of course, there are endless discussions about the fact that you cannot find pure cases of any of these categories in real life. But ad hoc examples and thought experiments drown the critical mind in a sea of metaphors.

As long as human curiosity was limited to the data provided by natural phenomenology, there was no choice but to follow the lead of macro-categories. Historical semiotics was a bold effort toward the abstract understanding of thought and communication. The nano-scale of molecular and atomic interactions is still out of reach for investigating meaning-making and symbolic interacting. But the meso-scale can now be explored on both the conceptual and empirical levels. Semiotics is waiting for a new generation of researchers who will awaken this beautiful science-to-be from the deep sleep of its dogmatic night.

At the very least, semiotics is a good idea. Trying to understand how humans make sense of their lives, their environment, and the ways in which they interact with, and influence each other through signs is a fundamental endeavour. Semiotics, under any other name, is bound to have emerged when early humans evolved the cognitive capacity to encompass more than a single point of view and represent others as a source of signs, and discriminated between intentional and non-intentional signs with considerable adaptive consequences.  Now known as TOM (Theory of Mind) in evolutionary and developmental psychology, this competence is double-edged as all adaptations are: it enhanced the deliberate sharing of information toward cooperation and enabled us to guess and interpret each other’s agenda; but it also drove humans to construe natural phenomena as intentional agencies and elaborate cosmologies in the form of conspiracy theories whose consequences were not always benign.

The urge to understand the nature and range of signs is all the more pressing at a time when quantitative changes in representation and communication technologies are creating qualitative transformations in what it means to be human. In the wake of Darwin’s theory, James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) called attention to the impact of the built environment on human evolution itself. Culture is indeed a major evolutionary force. During the last centuries, human knowledge has increased at a progressively faster pace. Notwithstanding the despondent philosophers that construe science as a mere succession of paradigms which cancel each other as time goes on, scientific knowledge has proven itself to be cumulative even if some models and theories had to be discarded along the way. After all, theories are what we conceptually build to make up for our ignorance. For long, the painstaking observation and recording of facts – what we now call data – have been relatively sparse, and when they reached a critical mass their handling was a conceptual and computational challenge. When “facts” were only suggestive, theories were elaborated to make up for this lack of certainty and fill the gaps with speculations and generalizations in the hope that new data would prove them right and practical applications would vindicate them. Nineteenth-century semiotics was no exception. Is not now the time for semiotics to move on to the twenty-first century and leave behind ad hoc examples and thought experiments carried over from the scholastic past?

As we enter the age of transformation and witness the emergence of a new epistemological frontier, a time when research becomes data intensive, new methods of inquiry are called for. This is the theme of a recent collection of articles written through the collaborative efforts of scientists and Microsoft researchers, entitled The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery (2009) and edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle. The opening chapter is a transcript of a talk on e-science given by the visionary Jim Gray (1944-2007), shortly before he disappeared at sea, which set the theme of the book. Its four parts deal successively with “earth and environment”, “health and wellbeing”, “scientific infrastructure”, and “scholarly communication”. New means of monitoring and recording processes in these domains, among others, through the exponential development of sensors that gather information 24/7, create such an abundance of data that ways of making sense of this mass run the risk of falling behind. Research must move from a situation in which, in centuries past, the quantity of data was manageable within the scope of human working memory to an age of data availability that transcends the capacity of the relatively simple algorithms of the nineteenth-century methods of scientific discovery. When data reach the level of terabytes and keep increasing in quantity and quality, new ways of progressing on the path of human knowledge are needed.

The Fourth Paradigm [www.fourthparadigm.org] selectively addresses some of the most pressing issues: environment science, health care, scientific infrastructure, and communication of knowledge. Much is relevant in this collective work to the concerns of twenty-first century semioticians. In this age of transformation, semiotics must move from a data-poor and speculation-rich endeavor to a full engagement with its new epistemological environment. Recoiling into mediaeval models on the pretext that the human mind must preserve itself against the assault of technology is self-defeating. As Andy Clark’s provocative book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (2008) convincingly suggests, the elusive human mind is coterminous with the tools it creates. The data stored in the clouds are neither more nor less a part of us than those recorded in books and individual memories. They are as liable to be lost as those preserved for most of our lifetime within the neuronal clusters of our brains. But social distribution and connectivity are key features of human cognitive resilience and biological survival.  As technology expands the reach of our organs of perception well below and beyond the thresholds of the natural phenomena for which natural selection fine-tuned our brains, the resulting information overload exceeds both the storage capacity and the computational capability of individual brains. The challenge is to create new powerful algorithms able to smartly mine this high tide of data and make sense of it. Evolution never rests.