Vol. 6 (2023): Digital Age in Semiotics & Communicationan

Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication, a journal from the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University and founded by Prof. Kristian Bankov, explores the new forms of knowledge, social and linguistic interaction, and cultural phenomena generated by the advent of the Internet.

The purpose of the journal is to provide a collaborative work field for scholars interested in researching new phenomena in the dynamic digital world. Our main purpose is to build a scientific bridge between the fields of semiotics, communications, social sciences and the problems of the digital era.

The digitization of education is a complex and comprehensive process which is difficult to fit into a single research effort. Therefore, our ambition with this issue of the journal is not comprehensiveness, but rather a combination of different disciplinary approaches. Our hope is to achieve a good example of collaboration which partially took place during the semiotics conference of the same title held in Sozopol at the beginning of September 2022. Digital culture as a subject of scientific research is interdisciplinary in its very essence, much more so than the pre-digital cultural types which preceded it. Its rise has put many of the established disciplinary divisions in crisis, as well as most educational institutions. Another characteristic of digital culture is its unprecedented dynamism. This is something which greatly reduces the “shelf life” of our theoretical models, generalizations and results of specific research, especially when considering that the epochal change happened within a generation. The positive side of this enormous complexity is that all research perspectives are now open and there are almost no established scientific hierarchies to stifle the research entrepreneurship of the digital natives.

We cannot introduce this issue of the journal without a brief overview of the main points where digitization has had the most significant impact on education. Although there is no clear boundary between them, I will summarize these influences relevant to the chosen perspective in two groupings: technological and cultural.