Sustainability,cognitive technologies and the digital semiosphere

Technological convergence and the cognitive expansion of the technosphere

As a consequence of the Industrial Revolution the technosphere has grown exponentially, driven by the convergence of science and many different types of technology. In this development the technosphere went from representing mostly the mere built environment to constitute and encompass a massive digital techno-web. Particularly with the convergence of digital and multimodal cognitive technologies, the technosphere has been expanded not only geographically but also qualitatively in terms of connectivity and ubiquitousness. This has given rise to a global web of infrastructure for information management and communication spread throughout the entire biosphere, reaching out to the atmosphere and into the already crowded geostationary orbits around the earth. Such interconnectivity has increased the possibilities for cultural exchanges in the global virtual space of the semiosphere and can be said to be the enabling element of what we perceive as globalization and the rise of what we call digital culture (Bruni, 2011). Such cultural process is a central element in the determination of sustainable paths for men and women in the biosphere and its life-support systems.

The customary denominations of ‘media technology’ and ‘information and communication technology’ seem to fall short of being able to encompass the ever-increasing levels of integration and convergence proposed by the new tendencies. Among these trends we can include established, as well as emerging, technological fields or paradigms such as ubiquitous and pervasive computing, ambience intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, affective computing, wearable computing, embedded network systems, tangible interfaces, seamless interfaces, nanotechnology, enactive interfaces as well as developments such as cloud computing, the social-semantic web, and a whole new generation of social and ‘intelligent’ media applications.

These tendencies intend to create ubiquitous local ramifications and ‘transparent’ points of entrance (of commercial and civilian interest) to the global cultural-institutional techno-web already in place and in continuous evolution, which hosts the digital semiosphere (see p. 00). The prospect is that through such converging technological platforms we will be continuously ‘immersed’ and have the possibility to interact with an ‘on-line’ cultural process mediated by all kinds of new ways of representing our thoughts, emotions, ideas, beliefs, opinions and behaviours. The substrate of the semiosphere is in this way expanded, and those with access have the possibility of navigating into new frontiers of the semiosphere which were not possible before – for good or for bad (Bruni, 2011).

A much neglected aspect during the hectic development of these multimodal, interactive and immersive digital technologies is the cultural dynamics that generates the ‘content’ – the narratives that can be mediated through such technological set-ups and the cultural ecologies in which they are embedded. To the ‘whole canvas of technological facts and features of a physical, chemical or biological nature’ which Batisse included in the technosphere, we now need to add the new facts and features of a cognitive nature that the new technologies bring about.

While the pervasiveness of immersive and interactive virtual or augmented environments may be an increasing trend in the future of the industrialized parts of the world, it will still for a long time only cover an elite part of the world population. Here lies the paradox of whether total global inclusion would actually imply an unsustainable development of the technosphere, in terms of energy and material consumption for its design, construction and maintenance. This is the sustainability aspect most frequently discussed in relation to the expansion of the digital technosphere: the ever-increasing carbon footprint from the exponential growth of data centres (Briscoe and Marinos, 2009). However, the sustainability aspect of the cultural process that such infrastructure hosts is still underestimated. This includes the possibility of potentiating multiple positive feedback loops of unsustainable cultural processes (for example consumerism, speculation, slavery, prostitution, violence, exploitation) in the concomitant enlargement of the semiosphere.

McLuhan’s (2001 [1964]) insight, that the technology of new media disappears behind the content that ‘flows’ through it, has led some writers like Nicholas Carr (2010) to reconsider as central McLuhan’s point that, in the long run, it is not the new medium’s content that matters but the changes it brings in our cognitive faculties and behaviours. Carr adds that not even the visionary McLuhan could have foreseen the extension and the effect of our current ubiquitous digital immersion. I can fully agree that the new cognitive (or ‘intellectual’ as Carr calls them) technologies are transforming, if not our functions at least our cognitive processes. However the issue of the ‘content’ cannot be neglected, for it is the central one in the analysis of how the cultural process mediated through the technosphere has the utmost importance in terms of ecological, cognitive and cultural sustainability for human kind.

The digital semiosphere

The semiosphere as envisioned by Lotman (1990, 2005 [1984]) is the necessary condition for culture to continue its historical unfolding. It has a diachronic dimension in the sense that, through the use of languages and media we are in touch with the ‘virtual facts’ (since they don’t exist any more) and narratives from the past and from many different cultural currents that have taken life throughout human history. It also simultaneously has a synchronic dimension implied by the active cultural process of the present where so many languages, cultural texts and currents mingle continuously in many dynamic layers of the whole semiosphere. The continuous diachronic-synchronic interplay determines the extension or the reach of a particular culture in a particular period.

As stated by Torop (2005), the notion of the semiosphere is a great contribution in that it brings cultural analysis into contact with both history and the newest phenomena in culture, including of course what interests us here, digital culture. If we consider the current state of contemporary globalized culture we can say that the evolution of the technosphere has enormously increased the possibilities to navigate and reach synchronically and diachronically much larger extensions of the semiosphere than ever before. The hyper-availability of texts and cultural representations of all kinds in real time expands the geography of human knowledge and cultural production as never before – not only because of ease of access but also because of accumulated quantity. However more is not necessarily better as a positivistic view of progress would claim. As described by Lotman, the semiosphere is a dynamic space where many small and big, past and present, sub-semiospheres continuously interact, creating new layers of meanings, transforming information and knowledge by continuous translations and interpretations of the old and the new, of the official and the fringe, of what belongs to the centre of a given sub-semiosphere and what comes from the periphery into the centre transforming its very nature.

The so-called ‘digital divide’ means that entire cultural layers may be excluded from the semiotic space constituted by digital culture, which represents a particular semiosphere with the process of digitalization determining its structural boundaries, that is, what has not been digitalized belongs to the extrasemiotic sphere, it remains out of the semiotic system, outside the boundaries of culture. Digitalization corresponds then to Lotman’s process of ‘naturalization’, the necessary transformation from ‘foreign’ to ‘native’. An important question is then whether such ‘naturalization’ in digital culture entails a transformation of the cultural products, different in nature from the transformations occurring in non-digital culture.

At all stages of development there are contacts with texts and cultural products coming in from cultures which formerly lay beyond the boundaries of the given semiosphere. These dynamic relations, superpositions and transformations take on a critical and hypercomplex nature when it comes to digital culture. Across any synchronic section of the semiosphere, different languages, texts and cultural processes at different stages of development may be in conflict. The acceleration of these processes may have huge consequences for the tensions and trade-offs between cultural diversity and homogenization and for the emergence and proliferation of the thousands of unsustainable cultural details to which Bateson was referring.

On the nature of the semiosphere

The previous considerations, including our constant recourse to a geographical metaphor to describe the semiosphere, compel us to try to be more precise in grasping the nature of what is it we are calling semiosphere, in order to assess whether we are in risk of reifying the concept.

In Lotman’s terms, the relation and co-dependency of the individual cognizer (psychology) and the collective behaviour (culture) are conceptualized as arising ‘simultaneously as mutually interdependent contrasting alternatives’ (Lotman, 2009: 3). Through the introduction, or the constitution, of personality, behaviour is singularized from physiology to psychology and culture with a concomitant increase in semiotic freedom which gradually conquers ‘the space of unconscious physiology’ (Lotman, 2009: 3). In digital culture (and not only), individual cognition, with the help of technology, constitutes the local point of entrance to the semiosphere. Consciousness relates to the semiosphere in the sense that the collective process is actualized on a continuous basis by the aggregate of interacting cognizers.

Moreover, there is an analogy and at the same time a relation of embeddedness between the mind and the Umwelt of the individual cognizer (Favareau, 2009; von Uexküll, 2001 [1936]) and the rest of the semiosphere to which they belong or relate. Lotman has emphasized that an abstract model of communication that includes addresser, code/language and addressee is too limited to characterize cultural dynamics, because it would entail that the addresser and addressee would be fully identical, that is, sharing the same fixed (non-evolving) code (as opposed to a real language) and having the same memory capacity. In reality, individual cognizers have their particular decoding tools and, more importantly, their specific memory stores of their particular trips through the whole extension of the semiosphere. What changes with digital culture is the dimension of the memory store to which the individual mind has access and the modes of navigating and interacting with such semiotic space, that is, the off-loading (Dror and Harnad, 2008), or maybe rather up-loading, of the semiosphere in the navigable memory store of the technosphere.

As an illustration, we could say that the erudite person is a ‘well-travelled’ individual in the landscapes of the semiosphere. But the quantitative explosion of the semiosphere in digital culture poses a challenge to the erudite person: navigating larger extensions of the territory will not guarantee qualitative gains in erudition, as the landscape is filled with repetition, noise, triviality, misinformation, confusion, pornography and cognitive pollution. If such a landscape enriches the erudition of the erudite person it will be by virtue of his or her ability to categorize the myriad details encountered in such a way as to characterize the cultural dynamics of the time and the evolution and the extension of the semiosphere. Nevertheless, even disregarding and filtering out most of the noise and cultural pollution under the present level of reachability in the semiosphere, the erudite person faces a limit dictated by his or her cognitive capacity. This means, more than ever, that the condition of erudition depends on quality and not on quantity, and a great deal of that quality will have to do with the faculty of being able to discern and prioritize what will be allowed to be part of our internal representation of the travelled semiosphere, that is, our Umwelt (Favareau, 2009; von Uexküll, 2001 [1936]).

It is epistemologically important to be precise as to what is included or excluded in the concept of the semiosphere. Is the semiosphere a process, the way culture functions at an abstract level, independent of its historical development or real existence from which we could describe past, existing or even hypothetical cultures? Or is it always, as it is with the biosphere and the technosphere, a historical entity with accumulated content, virtually located throughout its vast ‘diachronic geography’, stored in material culture (including human bodies) but actualizable or accessible only by particular cognizers, with particular technologies, with their specific mind-sets and their idiosyncratic logbooks of their personal journeys throughout the territories accessible to them?

Or is it both, a sort of Platonic virtual world that includes all the knowledge and fantasy developed during the evolution of human kind, part of which is contingently accessible through the media fossil trail, and also the dynamic process of interpretation and reinterpretation of all those ‘texts’ and cultural products that mingle in diachronic-synchronic interactions?

I settle for this last connotation of the concept as it includes both the complex dynamic process finely delineated by Lotman – implying a ‘superorganic’ (Kroeber, 1917), actually semiotic, causality – and also the repository of content constituted by the cultural heritage and tradition of humankind, stored in a diachronic memory and actualized on a continuous basis in the synchronous semiotic process mediated by the enabling languages and technologies of the given period. In this geography, are the frontiers of the semiosphere determined by the total sum of all content stored in the complete set of existing media at a given time, all accessible to a subjective cognizer capable of actualizing portions of the semiosphere in his mind? Does this mean that the semiosphere is equivalent to the historical memory of an era? Or should we rather consider it not as the reachable landscape but as the dynamic and continuous transformation of such a landscape?

Cognitive technologies: Interfacing the mental and the cultural

In a very broad definition of ‘cognitive technologies’, Dror and Harnad (2008) include most of the technological platform that enables and support digital culture:

The worldwide web, a distributed network of cognizers, digital databases and software agents, has become our ‘Cognitive Commons,’ in which cognizers and cognitive technology can share cognizing anytime and anywhere, and interact globally with a speed, scope and degree of interactivity that yield distributing cognizing with performance powers inconceivable within the scope of individual cognition. (Dror and Harnad, 2008: 4)

But if we are to consider technology at the interface between cognition and culture, the latter cannot be simply reduced to ‘distributed cognition’, which would imply an atomization of culture denying to it its ontological status and any emergent qualities, as claimed by Lotman (and much earlier by Kroeber, 1917). In his time, Kroeber pointed out that ‘the current view rests upon the endlessly recurring but obviously illogical assumption that because without individuals civilization could not exist, civilization therefore is only a sum total of the psychic operations of a mass of individuals’ (1917: 207). He further claimed that biology and cognition have the individual as a reference and therefore ‘A social mind is as meaningless a nonentity as a social body’ (1917: 193). This makes us reflect on the pertinence and the implications of substituting culture with distributed cognition, cognitive commons and similar collective summations of cognition, even if these are ontologically recognized as emerging properties. The reductionist tendencies that Kroeber was warning about were based in the failure to distinguish between the cultural and the cognitive. Everything cultural can only exist through cognition, but culture is not mental action itself, ‘it is carried by men, without being in them. But its relation to mind, its absolute rooting in human faculty, is more than plain’ (Kroeber, 1917: 189). The reduction and correlation of the biological and the cognitive leads to a natural ‘but as yet unjustified step further’ to assume the cultural as cognitive, whence the explanation of culture in terms of physiological and mechanical terms becomes an unavoidable consequence.

This is why it is important in the technosphere–semiosphere dynamics to maintain clear the relation between the individual cognizers, their individual cognitive processes and the semiotic space of culture, the semiosphere. Acknowledging a superorganic perspective means that synchronous enlargements of individual cognitive processes such as distributed cognition, extended minds, social cognition and social neuroscience, would not lead to reducing the sociocultural to cognition and thereby to neural correlates and genes, as the emerging field of cultural neuroscience (Chiao, 2009) is advocating. Rather we need to consider the mediating role of technology in the heterarchical embeddedness of perception, cognition and culture in the processes of semiosis (Bruni, 2008a, 2008b, in press). These mediations, representations, mappings, and translations of contents and contexts are the central features of the enabling cognitive technologies that open for us the doors of the semiosphere, which is a world of semiotic freedom, intersubjective meaning and intelligibility, and not simply of sensations, perceptions and neural correlates.

The semiosphere is alive by virtue of the actualization and transformations of the storing media that millions of cognizers enact dynamically in relation to each other and to the stored landscape of content, which may change physically in its encoding, or cognitively and culturally in its interpretation in a given context, and with the further complexity given by the diachronic interaction with billions of humans that have preceded us.

The intelligent technosphere and the content of the semiosphere

Prompted by the salience of the emerging and convergent digital technosphere, there are several recent descriptions of the co-evolution and mutual determination of our cognitive system and what could be considered as cognitive or ‘intellectual’ technologies (instruments, media, languages and notations) (see for example Carr, 2010; Clark, 2001, 2003). These points of view put the main emphasis on ‘our sense of self, and about the nature of the human mind’ (Clark, 2001:18) or on how the medium affects or changes our cognitive system, with a tendency to underestimate or exclude consideration of the content ‘flowing’ no longer just in a particular medium but in the whole expanding technosphere.

We see some of the ‘cognitive fossil trail’ of the Cyborg trait in the historical procession of potent Cognitive Technologies that begins with speech and counting, morphs first into written text and numerals, then into early printing (without moveable typefaces), on to the revolutions of moveable typefaces and the printing press, and most recently to the digital encodings that bring text, sound and image into a uniform and widely transmissible format. Such technologies, once up-and-running in the various appliances and institutions that surround us, do far more than merely allow for the external storage and transmission of ideas.

What’s more, their use, reach and transformative powers are escalating. New waves of user-sensitive technology will bring this age-old process to a climax, as our minds and identities become ever more deeply enmeshed in a non-biological matrix of machines, tools, props, codes and semi-intelligent daily objects. We humans have always been adept at dovetailing our minds and skills to the shape of our current tools and aids. (Clark, 2001: 18)

On the other hand, based on what he calls the ‘science of neuroplascticity’, Carr (2010) points out that our developmental cognitive make-up is a dynamic one, which can completely rearrange its ‘wiring’ and fundamental modes of working (not the content of its memory though) according to the interaction with the intellectual or cognitive technologies that serve as elongations of the human cognitive system. He claims that:

With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book. (2010: 116)

All these fit well with Carr’s reinterpretation of McLuhan’s arguments to state that it is not the new medium’s content that matters but the changes it brings in our cognitive processes and behaviours. However, from the sustainability point of view it is problematic to assume that the content does not matter, that the only relevant effects are the changes (for good or for bad) in our cognitive faculties, and that these effects are content-independent.

A lot of research supports – and will continue to support – the belief that the new digital technologies are changing, improving, constraining, enhancing and damaging our cognitive faculties and health. In this line of thinking, internet as we know it today may be just the tip of an iceberg that, with the rapid technological convergence, will continue to emerge in the process of interfacing our body-minds with more fully immersive, pervasive, multimodal, representational, enactive, hyper-interactive environments, filled with content, ‘texts’ and cultural products of all sorts and coming from indefinite cultural currents and periods. The new navigation and interaction tools, and the new multimodal representational modes will certainly push the ergonomics of our perceptive and cognitive systems to the limits (see for example the emerging fields of ‘augmented cognition’ and ‘neuroergonomics’; Parasuraman, 2011; Schmorrow et al., 2009), but this entails a physiological-cognitive issue not yet a cultural one. The constant transformation and the filling of ever vaster territories of the semiosphere is what shapes the cultural issue proper.

Both issues (the physio-cognitive and the cultural) are closely tied to each other, as if through a revolving door, posing the problem of what I have referred to as cognitive sustainability (Bruni, 2011). This view may be seen as a re-contextualization of Gregory Bateson’s seminal insight on ‘ecology of mind’ in the times of digital culture. The individual (cognizer), under constant and ever-increasing cognitive pressure from the multimodal overload of content, choices and interactions, will have difficulties in discerning sustainable pathways in the explosive semiosphere. The ecology of ideas in such complex and accelerating semiotic space will present highly contradictory and dissonant tendencies in cultural processes that may present great difficulties for individuals, communities and whole cultural layers to reconcile such tendencies with a healthy direction that does not disrupt the life-support systems of the biosphere and the cognitive (and physiological) health of individuals and communities.

In a framework that considers the digital semiosphere, the focus would be rather on the cultural dynamics that results from the acceleration of processes implicit in the contemporary technosphere, where the ‘content’, cultural products, texts and objects of signification are as crucial, in terms of sustainability, as the cognitive changes and limits of the participating individuals. Clark (2001) tangentially mentions the cultural level when he eloquently states that ‘human brains maintain an intricate cognitive dance with an ecologically novel, and immensely empowering, environment: the world of symbols, media, formalisms, texts, speech, instruments and culture’ (2001: 21) and that ‘we humans are, by nature, products of a complex and heterogeneous developmental matrix in which culture, technology and biology are pretty well inextricably intermingled’ (2001:22). Nonetheless, in such a perspective we would still be at the individual cognitive level, since even extended, distributed and situated cognition are not yet dealing with processes at the cultural or semiospheric level proper. It would therefore be important to trace where the qualitative changes, if any, lie in terms of the representational and navigational capacity of media, which, in turn, can have a bearing, or effects, on modes of signification and therefore on what it is preponderantly being signified in a particular cultural current.

The potentials and constraints that the digital technosphere will pose on the dynamics of the global semiosphere are unforeseeable. Even more so if, in addition to the already mentioned technological paradigms, we consider new trends that not only alter or innovate representational and interactive modes of networked media, but which directly impinge upon, or condition, the very dynamic itself, as for example the increased use of ‘cloud computing’ (Dillon et al., 2010), distributed information systems, ‘digital ecosystems’ (Gerard and Marinos, 2009), repositories and other virtualized resources, and the development of intelligent servers, tag systems, social networks and other semantic web technologies and frameworks such as Web 2.0 and the social-semantic web (Greaves and Mika, 2008; Gruber, 2008) – which link users and cultural products according to some sort of ‘swarm intelligence’ patterns. However, the ‘intelligence’ of such patterns and the resulting potential flock behaviours should not be taken for granted. The question is whether the design and optimization of such systems, and the conditions or constraints that they may impose on cultural dynamics, are independent of the signification sphere of the cultural products circulating in the semiosphere, which is mediated by such digital platforms.

These trends, with concepts such as ‘collective intelligence’, social-semantic web, community clouds, and others, intend to ‘address the fundamental concept of socially shared meaning’ (Greaves and Mika, 2008), that is, the territories of the semiosphere. In a sense, technological design is altering, funnelling and conditioning the ‘natural’ dynamics of the semiosphere as we have understood it until now. If there is a major qualitative cognitive change in the web of cognizers it is the habituation to and dependency on the collective ‘intelligence’ of such a semantic web. In fact, the software for this technological structuring largely conditions the semiosphere’s dynamics, with the consequent instantiation of implicit normative values (Ibrus, 2010). It is therefore pertinent to ask in what sense this ‘intelligence’, which is pervasively sought by designers of automatic systems, is being understood:

In a social-semantic web, certain formally representable parts of human meaning can be encoded and reasoned about via the tools of the semantic web, but can also be curated and maintained via the social, community-oriented techniques of Web 2.0. The results of this combination would be powerful indeed.

The social-semantic web promises that the subtle variations in meaning that characterize different human communities can be managed via the user-friendly collaboration mechanisms of Web 2.0, while still maintaining the expressive precision and reasoning power of the semantic Web. This would make possible a new class of applications that could leverage the semantic relations that exist between certain kinds of web-accessible data to automatically locate and fuse information, perform basic reasoning, and pivot and transform representations to meet a wide variety of user needs. (Greaves and Mika, 2008: 1)

In general, the intelligence of the system in this context may tend to substitute human decision-making and diminish an individual cognizer’s own criteria and capacity for judgment and discernment.

Digital media, fluent global communications networks, and potent search engines will combine to support global intellectual swarming, creating a common arena in which the pooling, combination, selection, recombination, and mutation of ideas can occur faster and more efficiently than ever before. (Clark 2003: 157)

A pertinent question would be whether such a resulting semiosphere would end up producing a massive ‘mashup’, shuffling and reshuffling content into ‘collective intelligence’ creations with no real linkage or continuity to a particular cultural tradition, and therefore at risk of being disconnected from the ethical tension necessary in the search for the kind of wisdom that a sustainable path entails. In other words, the kind of wisdom that can distinguish the difference between mere data, information and knowledge, and that is capable of discerning what kind of knowledge and innovations are indispensable for sustainability. Will the implicit normativity in such an intelligent system give way to a sort of hyper-relativism dictated by the copy-paste narratives resulting from the dynamic landscape of buzz-words? Or, to use Clark’s words, there will be flocks or ‘swarms’, of people ‘electronically tagged by various forms of simple wearable computing, and … moving among a dense backdrop of signal sensitive, intercommunicating devices’ (Clark, 2003: 163), and, for instance, while navigating in the world with our GPS mobile augmented reality goggles, our decisions, choices and actions will be informed and continuously influenced by what others have done in the same place and in a similar circumstances.

Or, as Clark (2003: 158) puts it, would this represent a ‘dysfunctional communal narrowing of attention, exacerbated by a process of runaway positive feedback or a bad case of what is sometimes also known as early path-dependency’. Clark (2003) describes this phenomenon of ‘narrowing’ in relation to e-commerce and the act of purchasing following suggestions from provider’s search engines, which ‘intelligence’ is fed by the flock of consumers. The phenomenon may very easily be extrapolated to the larger cultural dynamics that will be taking place in the digitalized semiosphere, when we are going to be surrounded by ‘biofriendly interfaces: software agents that know enough about human language and human psychology to grease the wheels of human–machine interaction’ (Clark, 2003: 178).

Hyper-relativism and the unpredictable future of normativity

To Lotman’s (2009) discussion of cultural ‘gradualness’ and ‘explosion’, we need to add ‘acceleration’ as a process tending to denature the thresholds of gradualness, leading us into continuous chain reactions of micro explosions. In this sense, however, ‘explosion’ does not always have one of the positive connotations implied by Lotman when he links explosion to ‘inspiration’ and ‘creative tensions’ that allow the appearance of talents and geniuses. Under cultural (and technological) acceleration the process of creativity and innovation may very well be blinded, autotelic and/or unsustainable, not only for the culture itself but also for the life-support systems in which cultures are embedded.

As stated before, acceleration entails also a process of cultural and technological convergence, transforming the uniqueness of particular cultural explosions into webs and synergies of many cultural explosions at once, increasing exponentially the ‘equipossible’ outcomes into a whole new kind of uncertainty (as envisioned by authors such as Bateson, 1972; Beck, 1992; Jonas, 1984 ). However, convergence may turn out not to be a completely casual process led exclusively by some sort of technological drift. Convergence may be the result of policies inspired by tacit ideals of eudemonia sprung from the process of Modernity and, in particular, by the many different types of resulting utopian positivist techno-optimisms, such as the ‘NBIC convergence movement’ (Bainbridge and Roco, 2005; Cai, 2011; Golledge, 2004), the ‘singularity movement’ (Chalmers, 2010; Hughes, 2012; Kurzweil, 2005; Sandberg, 2010) and transhumanism (Benedikter et al., 2010; Hughes, 2012; Jotterand, 2010), to name a few. Hughes (2012) presents a very thorough review of the variety of these ideologies, which can be related to what the philosopher Hans Jonas lucidly described as ‘the “utopian” dynamics of technical progress’ (Jonas, 1984: 21).

In this context ‘innovation and creativity’ as the driver of ‘progress’, without clear normative ideals, other than economic growth and science fiction as inspiration, could possibly head towards unsustainable pathways re-editing the two extremes of the indivisible dichotomy of aesthetics and ethics. The multimodal representational and immersive media, and the cultural tendencies hosted in them, are more prone to sensuality than to intelligibility – what Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa (2012) characterizes as ‘la civilización del espectáculo’ (the civilization of show business). This can be seen in the iconophilic tendencies of new media that more and more privilege percepts over semiosis. It is often assumed that the new digital cognitive technologies are what determine the shallow intellectual attitudes and achievements of our time (Carr, 2010). Whereas such manifestations of intellectual decadence may have also been prominent in other historical periods, if they are not all together the result of Modernity, the difference in our times is that digital technologies, through their mass-reaching effect, have brought us closer to populist ill-understood egalitarian and relativist stances of cultural and ‘intellectual’ activity, in which what used to be regarded as elitist and precious is now regarded as useless and gratuitous, even within the academic and scientific sphere, giving place to new agencies for legitimating knowledge.

But if culture has progressed, or at least increased, as in a positivistic conception, in terms of ‘complexity, heterogeneity, degree of coordination, or anything else’ (Kroeber, 1917: 211) ever since ‘the first animal that carried and accumulated tradition’ (1917: 211), then what is the importance of tradition in the semiosphere? Is progress thus conceived in terms of creativity and innovation in opposition to tradition, which in turn is what, according to Kroeber, is at the inception of civilization?

But since the risks taken for the sake of technological innovation are not taken to preserve what it exists or to alleviate what is unbearable, but rather to continually improve what has already been achieved, that is, progress, ‘which at its most ambitious aims at bringing about an earthly paradise’, creativity and innovation may therefore end up standing under the aegis of arrogance rather than necessity (Jonas, 1984: 36).

Instead of speaking of cultural evolution and development, I would rather refer to cultural dynamics and change, or even explosion (à la Lotman), in order to stay on the side of the positivistic notion of ‘progress’ which is often taken for granted, as if progress could be considered a monolithic parameter that encompasses all aspects of a given culture (or civilization) growing asymptotically towards perfection at all times (Guénon, 1982).

With the increase of connectivity and the overflow of information we tend to believe that we are moving from an information to a knowledge society. This view takes for granted that quantity per se will guarantee the qualitative jump from information to knowledge and from knowledge to wisdom:

In consequence of the inevitably ‘utopian’ scale of modern technology, the salutary gap between everyday and ultimate issues, between occasions for common prudence and occasions for illuminated wisdom, is steadily closing. Living now constantly in the shadow of unwanted, built-in, automatic utopianism, we are constantly confronted with issues whose positive choice requires supreme wisdom – an impossible situation for man in general, because he does not possess that wisdom, and in particular for contemporary man, because he denies the very existence of its object, namely, objective value and truth. We need wisdom most when we believe in it least. (Jonas, 1984: 21)

Can the knowledge organized, funnelled, tagged and ‘semantically’ predigested by the intelligent digital technosphere, with the resulting positive feedbacks that will increasingly seduce and augment the intensity of our appetition, provide the necessary wisdom for undertaking a sustainable cultural path? What layers of meaning and cultural currents in the semiosphere will work in counter-action to the wisdom that encourages sustainability? Paraphrasing Jonas (1984: 50), in order for the overarching narrative of the digital semiosphere not to end as ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’, where the millions of involuntary actors may end up seeking refuge in nothingness, a new ideal for guiding creativity and innovation will be the real challenge for our creative and innovative powers.