Digital mirror semiotics

Abstract

The new digital mirrors and the images they reflect, which often arouse desire and consumption differ from analogic mirrors that Umberto Eco considered to be outside the broad range of semiotics. Digital mirrors are, actually, screens that simulate mirrors, thus, they not only already ‘lie’ in their reflective function, but they can lie even more thanks to new formats and processes of digital mirroring, such as selfies and filters. about these new mirrors we ask the question “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”, which they always answer with “you, of course, always you”. In this sense, this article reflects on digital mirrors as part of a broader consideration of the ethics of images in the digital age. The ethics of images differs from the ethics of words since images always carry an intrinsic motivation that words do not. Images of course have something conventional in them, and words might have a motivation, yet the materiality of visual signs anchors the image to reality and to perception in a different and more coherent way, which is why images do not lie in the same way in which words do. Even when they are farfetched, the images transmit an idea of real possibility that words can hardly evoke. Two different ideological stances can be taken regarding the relation between images and the reality effect they prompt. Humanities, including semiotics, tend to emphasize the weight of the cultural context. However, increasing evidence shows that images also work due to matching the innate neurophysiology of cognition. Humans are biologically inclined to react to images, and representations trigger different perceptions depending on their technology, which is evolving by accumulation throughout human history. Semiotics is, therefore, called to debunk the realistic propaganda of new representation and display devices, pointing at their conventionality, and to consider how new advances in the production of simulacra tend to introduce emerging dynamics in the relation between the images and the human perception. The fake visual of today is indeed somewhat more powerful than those of past times since it is constructed by machines their outcome can be debunked only by other machines. Furthermore, the evolution of digital cultures creates a blurring of fictional and non-fictional genres and the fake visual starts to circulate like a virus, multiplying the occasions for ambiguous suspensions of disbelief. Thus, a new ecology of the fictional, able to give rise, in turn, to a reasonable “semioethics” of the fake visual, is necessary.