This book reveals the core features of digital culture, examined by means of semiotic models and theories. It positions commercial and market principles in the center of the digital semiosphere, avoiding the need to force the new cultural reality into the established textualist or pragmatist paradigms. The theoretic insights and case studies presented here argue for new semiotic models of inquiry that include working with big data, user experience and nethnography, along with conventional approaches. The book develops a new concept of identity in the digital age, analyzing the digital flows of recognition and value, which led to the tremendous success of Social Media and the Web 2.0 era. Self-expression, entertainment and consumerism are seen as the major drivers of identity formation in the post-truth era, where the self can no longer be considered independently of a given person's communication devices, where a substantial part of it is stored and actualized. It will be of interest to semioticians and researchers working on digital culture.

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Kristian Bankov (b. 1970) is a Professor of Semiotics at New Bulgarian University, visiting Professor at Sichuan University, editor-in-chief of the journal Digital Age in Semiotics and Communication, and has served as Director of the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies since 2007. In 2014 he was elected as the Secretary General of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS). His interest in semiotics began during the early nineties when he was studying in Bologna, following the courses of Umberto Eco and Ugo Volli. He has taught semiotics courses at New Bulgarian University since 1995. In 2000 he defended his PhD in Helsinki with Eero Tarasti. In 2006 he became an Associate Professor of Semiotics, and was promoted to Professor in 2011. His major interests are in the semiotics of new media and digital culture, sociosemiotics, identity, consumer culture, and semiotics of money. He has written four books and more than one hundred articles in Bulgarian, English, and Italian.

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