Vol. 2 (2019): Cultural Transformations of Love and Sex in the Digital Age

Volume II of Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication (2019), edited by Kristian Bankov, brings together eight articles on how digital technologies are reshaping intimacy, desire and sexuality. The contributions examine the semiotics of the face in online dating, asking whether digital idealisation threatens its aura, and offer a typology of the representation, enactment and economy of love and sex in video games, from early titles to immersive VR. A study of advertising compares a sex device promoted through technological rhetoric with a technology retailer that sells through sexual imagery. Other papers analyse how dating platforms turn the search for love into an endless search for options driven by the “fear of missing out”, and how Tinder users use tourist imaginaries to build their sex appeal. A critique of gay chat and dating apps such as Grindr shows how community capital is turned into an individualised product of consumption. The volume also includes a reading of feminism and pornography through Juri Lotman’s Culture and Explosion, and closes with “The Pleasure of the Hypertext”, a reflection on desire and pleasure in hypertextual culture.