DIGITAL ECO_LOGY

Abstract

The objective of this article is to review a series of semiotic contributions to the new media, computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction research, centring on the works of Umberto Eco. This well-known Italian professor and fiction writer is one of the pioneers of the debate on hypertext and an active interlocutor in discussions on the future of the book. Researchers interested in digital textualities, computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction have also applied Eco's theories. This article maps the connections between Eco's semiotic and digital field discussions.

Keywords:

• Umberto Eco
• semiotics
• hypertext
• interface
• interaction

Notes

To talk about ‘new media’ makes no sense: radio was a ‘new media’ in the 1920s and television in the 1950s. Blogs and collaborative platforms are currently considered ‘new media’, but in a couple of decades they will be considered another chapter in the handbook of media history (Scolari 2008c). Therefore, in this article I will write ‘new media’ within quotation marks.

For example Paolo Fabbri critiqued the absence of an analysis of passional states in Eco's purely cognitive approach to interpretation. For Fabbri ‘the lector in fabula executes condensations, movements or temporal references, but does not experience any kind of passion’ (1998, p. 107). As the most important representative of Algirdas Greimas' school in Italy, Paolo Fabbri has been the main semiotic counterpoint to Umberto Eco for over forty years.

The objective of our analysis is not to establish ‘who invented hypertext first’ but to describe the dangerous liaisons between textual semiotics, hypertext theory and deconstructionism. The animated debate between semiotics and deconstructionism may be followed through Eco (1995a).

Fifty years before Eco, Vannevar Bush proposed the ‘trail blazer’, an expert in information navigation: ‘There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record’ (Bush 1945). [Online] Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush (20 July 2008).

It may also be useful to read a brief analysis of the ludology versus narratology controversy in Frasca's Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes from a Debate That Never Took Place (Frasca 2003b).