Cultural Semiotics Analysis of Post-Truth and Fake News

Extract

[...] The author highlights that today what allows an information to be put forward is that it relies on the authenticity of the experience, regardless of any consideration of the context. She highlights that this methodology lacks reliability and relies instead on the naivety of readers and spectators. She also analyzes that this authentication relies not on the verification of facts but on a dialectic of being and appearance. In other words, we are looking to express what appears to be in line with the lived experience. [...]

[...] What comes first is authenticity. According to the notion of 'regime' put forward by philosopher Michel Foucault, who considered that a society produces and considers what it considers true in a given time. The author analyzes: 'The categories of cultural semiotics that I have mentioned here allow us to see that post-truth and fake news are not a pure and simple contemporary pathology of information, to be faced only through denunciation and repression (i.e. : to find the errors and correct them, in an atomic conceptual framework and a truth-correspondence according to which truth must be verified on each atomic concept stated, and must correspond to reality). [...]

[...] She analyzes that this cultural semiotics can be applied to a set of particular objects: literary texts, advertising discourses, masterpieces of history, television shows, and rites and forms of life. This cultural semiotics allows for attention to the cultural logics that underlie the analyzed object. To operationalize her proposal, she proposes to analyze 4 images taken from different media - A fashion advertisement for Amazon Fashion 2015 with model and actress Suki Waterhouse, where it is written 'don't be like me, be like you' - A photograph used by Donald Trump during his first presidential campaign, which refers to the television show he hosted, 'The Apprentice' - A tweet from the leader of the Italian populist and right-wing party 'Lega' - Matteo Salvini - where he boasts of only buying Italian fruits and vegetables - Finally, a viral tweet on Italian social media in July 2018, representing a migrant (Josefa) who arrived by boat in Italy, who despite her condition, has her nails polished The author then analyzes that these 4 images have in common to rely on a confusing logic rather than on facts whose truth would have been demonstrated, trying to highlight their authenticity. [...]

[...] Cultures function through systems of meaning (and therefore codes) that are socially accepted. Connected to these systems of meaning are systems of communication. Thus, culture as a whole is subject to 'semiotic laws'. These laws can be understood by studying the existing links between meaning and communication. Thus, the author analyzes that we should not study the fallacious and unreliable forms of journalistic information solely from the angle of a communication problem, but rather focus on the underlying modes of meaning. [...]

[...] Drawing on the theories of philosophers Umberto Eco and Jurij Michajlovi? Lotman, who have examined the logics of culture, and the theories of philosopher Michel Foucault, who has explored the notion of the regime in which truth can be inscribed, the author analyzes the semiotic logics underlying media content such as fake news. This reading guide will present the 3 structuring axes of this article: first, we will see that the author relies on the works of theorists of cultural semiotics to analyze these contents; second, we will analyze how the author analyzes the evolution of the meaning of reality; and finally, we will analyze the contributions of this article to the discipline of cultural semiotics. [...]