The post-advertising condition. a socio-semiotic and semio-pragmatic approach to algorithmic capitalism

Abstract

The primary hypothesis of this paper is that recent years have seen a shift from digital advertising to post-advertising: thanks to the growing role of machine learning algorithms in communicational processes, advertising has been losing the character of explicitly persuasive addresses to assume that of friendly and open proposals and advice, or even the simple facilitation of everyday purchasing practices. The paper seeks to understand if and under what conditions the socio-semiotic and semio-pragmatic approaches developed in relation to traditional advertising can still be applied to post-advertising phenomena. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first one, the advent of the post-advertising condition is considered. In the second one, Amazon’s Alexa, an example of a post-advertising dispositive, is analyzed. In the third part, the question of the use of traditional semiotic concepts and methods for the analysis of post-advertising is examined. The final answer to this question is affirmative, but on the condition that some new conceptual and methodological tools be introduced.