Reinterpretations of the semio-discursive tradition for the study of digital communication
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29105/gmjmx23.45-576Keywords:
semio-discursive ecology, platformization, public affects, enunciative automation, multimodal studiesAbstract
This article offers a rereading of the semiotic-discursive tradition for the study of contemporary digital communication. Its aim is to identify continuities, shifts, and updates in semiotic, discursive, and linguistic approaches in relation to platforms, social media, multimodality, affective publics, and generative artificial intelligence. The study is based on a theoretical and conceptual review of specialized literature on critical discourse analysis, visual semiotics, multimodal studies, cyberpragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, cultural semiotics, the affective turn, and artificial intelligence. The article shows that these traditions have not been displaced by digital media; rather, they have been pushed to reformulate categories such as message, discourse, meaning, code, mediation, authorship, genre, ideology, and circulation. It concludes that digital communication should be understood as a semiotic-discursive, technical, affective, multimodal, and algorithmic ecology, where meaning is not merely transmitted but produced, hierarchized, contested, intensified, and automated. The article’s main contribution is to provide a selective map for updating semiotic-discursive tools in light of the communicative challenges of the twenty-first century.
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