The Semiotics of Innovation

Abstract

This chapter deals with two fields of semiotic theoretical and analytical investigation: (1) innovation and (2) buzz, conceived as the marketing signification of novelty. After expounding on semiotic theories of innovation, the chapter tackles the question of novelty diffusion in human groups and communities. Creating buzz, enhancing buzz, and monitoring buzz are nowadays marketing and advertisement imperatives. There is virtually no commercial producer in the world that does not dream about surrounding its products, and their potential consumers, into a persistent, stupefying, seductive buzz. New digital technologies of communication, above all social networks, are turning buzz into a sort of religion: You are nobody if you are not preceded by buzz. What you do is nothing if it is not immersed into the buzz even before it comes about. But what is the buzz about buzz? How can semiotics observe, describe, and analyze the processes that lead to the creation, multiplication, transformation, and finally disappearing of buzz? Moreover, how can semiotics predict what consequences buzz culture will have on the way we create, share, remember, and forget meaning and its artifacts?

Maeterlinck uses the expression ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’ to name the powerful, enigmatic and paradoxical force that the bees seem to obey, and that the reason of man has never come to understand. (Victor Erice, in an interview on his movie ‘El espíritu de la colmena’ [The Spirit of the Beehive], 1973)