Eero Tarasti, Existential Semiotics Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2001.

This text will focus on the transformations of the practices and ideas of communication in recent history and in the context of the globalization. The lecture will examine first persuasion and then manipulation and seduction. These second issues are explained through the fact that in the context of the rise of mass as historical subject, conscience, and thus persuasion become obsolete. The approach examines the theoretical model of communication in this two historical contexts and concludes that a partial sector of (...) communication, "therapeutic communication", tends to model nowadays the process of communication as such. Based on the new practices and theoretical models of communication a new type of ideology appears, an ostensive one. (shrink)

Gal Laszlo, Societate si Logicitate Ed. Cartimpex, Cluj, 2004.

The pandemic seems to have reversed the relationship between Knowledge and Communication: communication prevails and determines the significance and meaning of events, just as it happened in premodern times. Public knowledge is being eroded. Post-modern scientific knowledge, already unfathomably complex and technical, is both evolving and becoming obsolete at such great speed that it unveils, paradoxically, the vulnerability and relativity of the truth it claims to grasp. Alongside truth-correspondence and truth-coherence, the older truth-significance also makes itself known. Amplified by the (...) resonance chamber of new media and social networks, the latter can emerge as the “post-truth” and “fake-news” that transform Public Communication into Public Relations. (shrink)

In the conference, the author approaches the manipulation, the persuasion and the seduction through the lenses of the anthropology of communication. Beginning with the Palo Alto school of thinking, communication started to be regarded not as much as a process of transmitting information, but rather as contributing to the construction of human relations. The author proposes a model in which argumentation is situated as a “zero level” of pure transmission of information. While persuasion is seen as the effect of the (...) individual’s status (or prestige) over a group, manipulation and seduction manifest theirs consequences at a mass level: manipulation being more elitist, and seduction realizing a re-naturalization of the sign, at the level of unconsciousness. Manipulation and especially seduction are explained as the elements of an “ostensive ideology”, that is the contemporary ideology of advertisement. (shrink)

AI can identify images, but cannot understand them as man does. The problem of understanding the iconic signs is the analogy, which cannot be clearly operationalized. Nothing guarantees signification by analogy, because it is neither the necessary effect of a cause, as in the indicative signs, nor the obligatory consequence of a rule, as of symbols. But the analogy is also fundamental to the human condition because our Ego implies the presence of Other. Or, just as the images, the understanding (...) of Other implies the analogy: he is a self like me, but another self than myself, that is, an analogous self. That is, you can understand the behavior of the other's activities and actions, even what he communicates as messages because you interpret them as if it were about yourself. Different from the human being who is an existent, in AI the essence precedes existence. Even if the algorithms of the analogy process will be infinitely perfected, that analogy will miss the interpretation that comes from the life of the existing one. AI knows digital, man understands analog; AI understands from knowledge, man knows from understanding. (shrink)

Review of Nicu Gavriluţă’s The Fools’ Mother is Always Pregnant. A Sociology of Everyday Pathologies. (Mama proştilor e mereu gravidă. Sociologia patologiilor cotidiene.) Foreword by Ştefan Afloroaei (Iaşi: European Institute, 2010).