I Was an Under-Age Semiotician

But there was more than just the-latest-from-France fashion to semiotics in those years. As a good friend once observed, it left many of us with an intoxicating sense that the everyday world — particularly the world of media — contained a secret layer of meaning that could be deciphered with the right key. (Some of that allure was packaged neatly into the “Symbology” discipline of the “Da Vinci Code” novels.) As we grew older, many of us started using different conceptual tools, but it was that initial rush during our semiotics years that got us started: that exhilarating feeling of being 20 and gaining access to a hidden world of knowledge. By the time I started writing books about technology and media in my late-20s, the sentences were shorter and the arguments less prone to putting themselves under erasure, but what animated my work was the sense that computer interfaces or video games had a subtle social meaning to them that was not always visible at first glance. That perspective was also the legacy of my semiotics years, and it turned out to be much more durable than the prose style.

I know of very few friends from that period who continue to practice Theory as it was taught to us then. But a striking number of semiotics students have gone on to influential careers in the media and the creative arts. (Perhaps anticipating this development, during my tenure at Brown the concentration was renamed Modern Culture and Media.) NPR’s Ira Glass, the novelist Rick Moody, the filmmaker Todd Haynes, Eugenides himself — all spent their formative years in the semiotics program. The antihero of Sam Lipsyte’s hilarious 2010 novel, “The Ask,” takes theory classes at a college clearly modeled on Brown. (Lipsyte was in fact my roommate for most of my college career; I like to think the stinging parodies of semio-babble in that book were modeled on his other friends.) A long list of aspiring semioticians went on to play important roles in the early days of digital media. Looking back, I suspect the semiotic worldview — with its constant emphasis on “textual play” — gave us conceptual antennas that helped us tune in to the hypertextual chaos of the Web when it first emerged.


Semiotics, for all its needless complications, still taught us to look for new possibilities in the ordinary, turning signs into new wonders. For all our talk about being post-everything, the most interesting thing about us turned out to be what we were pre- .

from The New York Times