Travels in hyper-semiosis: navigating the digitization of meaning
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper examines how digitization reconfigures cognitive and semiotic processes by proposing a framework of predictive cognitive semiotics. Moving beyond linear and representational models, it argues that meaning in digital environments emerges through recursive interactions among algorithmic architectures, affective modulation, and distributed cognition. Rather than functioning as static reference, meaning unfolds as a process of anticipation, orientation, and stabilization within asymmetrically structured and dynamically mediated systems. Drawing from convergent developments in cognitive science, process philosophy, and contemporary semiotic theory, the study conceptualizes digital meaning-making as a field process shaped by predictive infrastructures. Digital platforms, recommendation systems, and generative technologies participate directly in structuring attention, expectation, and interpretive likelihoods, prefiguring how signs are encountered and stabilized prior to conscious reflection. Through selected examples from everyday digital navigation and cultural circulation, the paper demonstrates how meaning is conditioned by recursive feedback between human agents and computational systems operating under differential weighting and reinforcement. It introduces a cartographic approach for tracing patterns of semiotic stabilization within unevenly organized environments. Digitized meaning is thus framed not as a fixed object to be decoded but as a structured terrain of probabilistic trajectories, where interpretive paths are amplified, marginalized, or deferred under conditions of algorithmic mediation.
Source: Semiotica
Author: Gregg S. Lloren
Institution: University of the Philippines Cebu
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7159990382