Semiotic perspectives on interactive languages 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.