Abstract

"Mass media have broadened the range of our knowledge and of what we are able to reach, but they have done it through an escalating number of cognitive mediations.... Media-society is the society of mediation, society of signs. While Peirce's semiotic does not give an adequate account of the cognitive relationship with the single sign, it offers, however, a very powerful image of the social life of signs themselves". This is one of the reasons that Fumagalli adduces for the growing interest in Charles Sanders Peirce's thought. We live in a "semiotic society," where a sign points to another sign, and then to another again. We are knowers and agents in a world which is not "directly" present; that is to say, it is in the middle of intersecting semiotic processes, of production of signs and interpretation of signs. The world is present through signs: newspapers, television, books, images, photographs, reports, reviews, telephones, posters, dollar bills, numbers in elevators, parking lot colors. The interpreter of these signs lives in the flux of intersecting interpretations, which, as soon as they are circulated, become themselves signs for more interpretations.