In 2024, for the first time, two Nobel Prizes-in Chemistry and Physics-were awarded for technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI). Notably, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized the development of AlphaFold 2, a system capable of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences, solving a problem that challenged scientists for decades. While AI-generated scientific images are not new, the case of AlphaFold 2 exemplifies the introduction of some changes in the generation process of these visualization devices that leads to rethink the genre of scientific images. Through semiotic analysis and Vil & eacute;m Flusser's philosophy of technical images, this contribution will try to conduct an analysis of the reshaping processes affecting this genre and to reflect on how to configure this new type of imagery from an epistemological point of view.
The investigation we propose aims to explore, through the tools of narrative semiotics, the ways in which social media produce new kinds of genres. Our analysis will encompass a range of specific texts, including social media help centers, user and marketer guides, post patterns identified through professional tools. The objective is to examine the defining features of the Post genre and the transformations introduced by Stories, Reels, TikToks, and similar formats-not limiting ourselves to surface-level communicative aspects, but instead highlighting modes of enunciation, actantial structures, as well as thymic and
The interaction between new practices and new media for writing and reading has a significant impact on contemporary writing genres. Caught between different digital devices, media and practices, new formats are emerging that challenge pre-existing norms. This is the case, for example, with "short stories", which can be placed at the crossroads between narrative genres and short genres, defined by the external material characteristic of spatial or temporal constraint, showing a linguistic and semiotic autonomy in relation to its environment. These allow us to observe the cooperation of very different devices, media and practices (transport, reading, consumption, etc.) in the process of the emergence of a genre.
The present study focuses on the investigation of a prevalent phenomenon within the domain of political communication: censorship, as manifested in iconic messages. In recent years, this practice has been the subject of scholarly discussion, particularly within Media Studies, where it has been conceptualized as intersemiotic or intericonic phenomenon. This conceptualization reflects the view that intericonic censorship, as observed in press communication, may be effectively analyzed as a translation process. It is argued that Translation Studies, the Semiotics of Translation, and Structural Semiotics collectively furnish the requisite conceptual apparatus for approaching this phenomenon as a translation process. The examination is substantiated by illustrative instances originating in the Greek and international press. Although the phenomenon traces its origins to the first half of the twentieth century, it appears to endure and maintain its relevance in the current millennium. This sustained presence corroborates Lotman's assertion that translation functions as the essential instrument of semiotic research.
This article analyzes the performative construction of gender through television genres and the forms of their social consumption shaped by the medium. TV, from its origins as a "domestic environment" predominantly associated with the feminine through serials and soap operas, has historically defined traditional gender archetypes according to the evolution of the media environment, until the current digital landscape with channels explicitly for him and for her. Beyond personalized and targeted consumption, the transition towards transmedia seriality and the broader openness of generalist TV to other media platforms, has promoted forms of socialization no longer strictly tied to the viewer's specific gender or the content's genre, but rather to the capacity to collectively reinterpret complex media worlds-notably fostering the expression of an LGBTQ+ audience. Rather than seeking a third binary gender, this community leverages the very performativity of both sexual gender and media genres to re-elaborate mainstream codes, often through trash television. "Trash" here is interpreted not as low value, but as material activated and re-valued by a social practice of sharing and complicity that reveals the constructed nature of gender and genres. Through parodic remediation across different platforms, the LGBTQ+ audience not only reasserts its identity but also highlights the constant reproduction and manipulation of gender within the complex and stratified contemporary media ecosystem.
