The Post-advertising Condition. A Socio-Semiotic and Semio-Pragmatic Approach to Algorithmic Capitalism

The primary hypothesis of this paper is that recent years have seen a\r\nshift from digital advertising to post-advertising: thanks to the growing role of\r\nmachine learning algorithms in communicational processes, advertising has\r\nbeen losing the character of explicitly persuasive addresses to assume that of\r\nfriendly and open proposals and advice, or even the simple facilitation of\r\neveryday purchasing practices. The paper seeks to understand if and under what\r\nconditions the socio-semiotic and semio-pragmatic approaches developed in\r\nrelation to traditional advertising can still be applied to post-advertising phenomena.\r\nThe paper is divided into three parts. In the first one, the advent of the\r\npost-advertising condition is considered. In the second one, Amazon’s Alexa, an\r\nexample of a post-advertising dispositive, is analyzed. In the third part, the\r\nquestion of the use of traditional semiotic concepts and methods for the analysis\r\nof post-advertising is examined. The final answer to this question is affirmative,\r\nbut on the condition that some new conceptual and methodological tools be\r\nintroduced.