Semiotic perspectives on interactive languages for life on the screen

• Computer language researchers generally ignore semiotics.
• Semiotics is the study of signs and meaning covering all signification systems.
• Semiotics has a qualitative nature, whereas CS and IS are mainly quantitative.
• Computing is no longer the art of problem solving, it is about meanings.
• Semiotics can lead to languages that represent our ‘selves’ for life on the screen.

Cross-disciplinary research involving semiotics and computer science is rare. With the Web 2.0, contemporary activities of users can be properly described as real ‘life on the screen’. One of the challenges for the design of interactive languages is to support these activities and to express the much wider variety of meanings that users want to exchange through and with software. As the discipline whose aim is to investigate meanings, through representation and interpretation processes, semiotics is remarkably well-positioned to contribute with new knowledge in our field. This viewpoint article examines the reasons why in spite of this positioning, semiotics remains unpopular among researchers interested in interactive computer languages. In particular, it proposes that a semiotic approach can help us think about computer languages to represent our individual and collective ‘selves’ on the screen.