Sara Cannizzaro

Businesses in the smart home sector are actively promoting the benefits of smart home technologies for consumers, such as convenience, economy and home security. To better understand meanings of and trust in the smart home, we carried out a nationally representative survey of UK consumers designed to measure adoption and acceptability, focusing on awareness, ownership, experience, trust, satisfaction and intention to use. We analysed the results using theories of meanings and acceptability of technologies including semiotics, social construction of technology (SCOT) and sociotechnical affordance. Our findings suggest that the meaning and value proposition of the smart home have not yet achieved closure for consumers, but is already foregrounding risks to privacy and security amongst the other meaning-making possibilities it could afford. Anxiety about the likelihood of a security incident emerges as a prominent factor influencing adoption of smart home technology. This factor negatively impacts adoption. These findings underline how businesses and policy-makers will need to work together to act on the sociotechnical affordances of smart home technology in order to increase consumers' trust. This intervention is necessary if barriers to adoption and acceptability of the smart home are to be addressed now and in the future.

This study investigated the coverage of the Trojan Horse news story with the aim to ascertain whether the representation of the Trojan Horse events by the British press emphasised ‘Islamist extremism’ over ‘poor school governance’. A content analysis allowed us to gather quantitative data from the coverage (the ratio of evidence of Islamist ideology to poor governance) and qualitative data from both categories (the kind of evidence reported, e.g. ‘neglecting Christian kids’ or ‘Governors intimidate staff’). The sample coverage was extracted from five national newspapers and ranged from 9 June (the date of release of the Ofsted Advice Note) to 26 June 2014. Analysis showed that the coverage of the Trojan Horse news story reported evidence of Islamist ideology more frequently (61.5%) than evidence of poor governance (38.5%). These findings suggest that the Trojan Horse news story was by and large represented as a case of Islamist extremism and therefore not covered in a balanced manner. Such a partial coverage relied on the press tradition of representing Islam and Muslims in terms of ideological dualisms and negative stereotypes, and on the textual strategy of selecting some features (extremism) whilst omitting others (governors’ misconduct, incompetence, personal politics and conflict of interests).

This article shows that the origins of the confusion surrounding the theoretical status of internet memes today can be found in Richard Dawkin’s theory of culture as proposed in the Selfish Gene (1976) and later developed in memetics, the science of memes. Memetics’ concern with memes as ‘units’ that are transmitted via ‘copying’ between individuals appears to be problematic from the perspective of the longer-established framework for the study of culture which is semiotics. This article presents an alternative to the atomic and transmissible view of cultural information: that is, a take on memes that draws on biosemiotics and cybersemiotics, Tartu-Moscow semiotics and Peircean semiotics. Following this change of perspective on memes it is argued that contemporary internet memes in digital culture should be theorised as signs-systems with the habit to take new habits or translations, which in turn, are characterised by ‘asymmetry’ and ‘invariancy’. The semiotic analysis of the Rebecca Black’s Friday internet meme (YouTube 2011) shows that the adoption of this framework enables one to identify and analyse key moments in the development of a specific internet meme, a move that may constitute a further step for the semiotic investigation of digital culture as a whole.

This article explores the hypothesis that biosemiotics is a contemporary development of modern systems theory. It does so by arguing that biosemiotics and systems theory share a transdisciplinary drive derived from their common interest in systems thinking.

This paper will make a comparative discussion of the key ideas of the early 20th Century biologists Jakob von Uexküll (1864 – 1944) and D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 – 1948). These two scientists have both tackled the theme of a then popular topic of scientific interest, namely the forms of living beings.

What is interesting about their work is that both have explored the topic of form with profoundly different approaches, one focussing on the causes of form, the other focussing on the purpose of living beings' forms. However, despite this divergence of methods both of them have, sometimes to the same extent, sometimes to different extents, put forward ideas that predicted and anticipated fundamental principles in the modern disciplines of cybernetics and systems theory, and also in the more contemporary paradigm of biosemiotics. As such both Uexküll's and Thompson's work can be considered as constituting the systemic theoretical foundations of both cybernetics and biosemiotics.

Keywords: form, meaning, function, mathematics, biology

This article explores the usefulness of interdisciplinarity as method of enquiry by proposing an investigation of the concept of information in the light of semiotics. This is because, as Kull, Deacon, Emmeche, Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt state, information is an implicitly semiotic term (Biological Theory 4(2):167–173, 2009: 169), but the logical relation between semiosis and information has not been sufficiently clarified yet. Across the history of cybernetics, the concept of information undergoes an uneven development; that is, information is an ‘objective’ entity in first order cybernetics, and becomes a ‘subjective’ entity in second order cybernetics. This contradiction relegates the status of information to that of a ‘true’ or ‘false’ formal logic problem. The present study proposes that a solution to this contradiction can be found in Deely’s reconfiguration of Peirce’s ‘object’ (as found in his triadic model of semiosis) into ‘thing’ and ‘object’ (Deely 1981). This ontology allows one to argue that information is neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’, and to suggest that, when considered in light of its workability, information can be both true and false, and as such it constitutes an organism’s purely objective reality (Deely 2009b). It is stated that in the process of building such a reality, information is ‘motivated’ by environmental, physiological, emotional (including past feelings and expectations) constraints which are, in turn, framed by observership. Information is therefore found in the irreducible cybersemiotic process that links at once all these conditions and that is simultaneously constrained by them. The integration of cybernetics’ and semiotics’ understanding of information shows that history is the analytical principle that grants scientific rigour to interdisciplinary investigations. As such, in any attempt to clarify its epistemological stance (e.g. the semiotic aspect of information), it is argued that biosemiotics does not need only to acknowledge semiotics (as it does), but also cybernetics in its interdisciplinary heritage.

On Beauty

There seems to be a relation or some sort of 'unity' between man's works and the spontaneously occurring works produced by nature such as shells, nests, horns and so on. To use Bertalanffy's term for describing common properties of objects or systems (1973), nature's forms and human forms are isomorphic. For example, efficient structures typical of shells or plants such as spirals and radii, are very common archetypes that recur throughout the whole body of humans' architecture. A spiral form can be easily found in the design of the pavement of a square, the staircase of a building or the cupola of a church, while plant's radiated structures have been beautifully utilised in Gothic architecture in the form of fan vaults. Therefore a certain relation between natural and human models appears evident. But one may easily argue on the legitimacy of hypothesising this very relation. How does such visible evidence entails 'truth' or, generally, a true causal relation? This question immediately raises another one: until what extent should we trust our senses – in this specific case, sight- and, more in general, what type of knowledge do perceptions provide?

In the aesthetic framework provided by the discussion on the relation between human and natural forms, this paper proposes a synthetic treatment of inferential methods, with emphasis on abduction. Being the only method of scientific enquiry that takes in serious consideration the fallible-but-creative knowledge-generation potential of perceptions, abduction allows to argue not only that there is a necessary link between human and natural forms, but that this link is indeed is causal. In other words, human aesthetics is profoundly and primarily shaped by natural evolution.

This chapter presents the debate on the philosophical nature of information that can be found in contemporary semiotics, particularly in a number of developments broadly grouped within the umbrella field ‘biosemiotics’. As an international and interdisciplinary research field, biosemiotics has continued to flourish over the past 50 years and, as its prefix shows, bio-semiotics is indebted to semiotics in respect to its conception of communication as sign processes. Biosemiotics, however, currently extends the remit of much semiotics in that it does not limit its object of research to the investigation of human communications alone (i.e. anthroposemiotics), but encompasses all types of communications in the biosphere, that is, cells’, plants’ and animals’ communications, including of course, those communication processes pertaining to the human animal. It is crucial to note early on that the very term ‘information’ is a controversial one in biosemiotics due to its affinity to sciences close to the development of technology and computing methods (for example, information theory and cybernetics) and thus, to its possible mechanicistic connotations which are rejected by much of contemporary biosemiotics. Biosemiotics in fact champions largely qualitative approaches to quantitative approaches, and by adhering to the semiotic paradigm rather than the strictly Shannon information paradigm (see Chapter 4), it uses analytical terms as ‘meaning’ and ‘signs’ rather than ‘information’. However, since “information is an implicitly semiotic term” (Kull, Deacon, Emmeche, Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt 2009: 169), then a discussion of information within the broad remit of biosemiotics should not be dismissed on the premise of disciplinary stereotypes (e.g. semiotics as being a purely humanist-indeterminist field with no space for any form of determinism). Hence, this chapter presents an overview of the general approaches and types of informational concepts that are implicitly or explicitly present in biosemiotics, including associated disciplines and schools of semiotics as Tartu-Moscow semiotics, zoosemiotics, and cybersemiotics.

Much contemporary applied, and externally-funded research requires interdisciplinarity to tackle complex world problems for sustainable future living, especially in the sciences. However, interdisciplinarity is a more difficult approach to adopt in the humanities, as these tend to remain largely skeptical about confronting ideas, findings and methods from the sciences. In order to counteract disciplinary insulation in the humanities, this chapter will attempt to integrate ideas originally developed in the sciences into established theories in the humanities. It will do so by proposing, firstly, to substitute the multimodal notion of ‘motivation’ (Kress 1993) for a less anthropomorphic notion of context, conceived broadly as cybersemiotics constraints (Brier 2008, 2009). This reconfiguration of context allows the cultural analyst to identify the feelings-emotional, environmental, physiological, erroneous, and second-order cybernetics’ observership constraints of verbal communication and culture. Secondly, this chapter will also argue that the originally mathematical idea of modelling system, developed in semiotics by Chernov (1988), Lotman (1967) and Sebeok (1988), and resonant of Brier’s cybersemiotics, would be more appropriate for cultural analysis rather than ‘discourse’. This reconfiguration of discourse into modelling system could enrich Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), including the multimodal type, on the basis of its pragmaticist, qualia-rich and phylogenetic stance. The benefit of such integrative initiative is that a cybersemiotic-inspired analysis of discourse in culture, can produce interpretations driven by a new polis, one that is not so much self-obsessed with the unicity of the human-animal species, and that always situates culture and society within a wider ecosystem.