Toward a Semiotics of the Digital Interfaces: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in a Virtual Environment of Formation

Abstract

The emergency of new virtual spaces designed for formation and education by the employment of new technologies, more precisely, by the employment of hypermedial dynamic resources through the Internet, brings forth a number of problematics that deserve our attention by virtue of the qualities that they present. In this sense, we should consider, first of all, that a virtual environment for education constitutes an associativetechnological device in which pedagogical practices and forms of mediated communication are associated. That is why discursive exchanges, enunciative displacements, and diverse types of links being established between the actors are supported by a series of textual and technological configurations found on electronic screens. Therefore, the subjects would operate with — and through — an interface on screen to access diverse (mediated) textual assemblies and to establish, through their discursive exchanges, a series of intersubjective links. On the other hand, the subject that participates in these spaces no longer operates — discursively — only in the comprehension, but also in the production of texts, thus becoming an enunciator that, as such, is inscribed in their own discourse, leaving marks of their subjectivity. In this new discursive dynamics, the subjectivity and the critical capacity of the subject occupy a central place. We will investigate here a set of problems related to the ways in which the relations are established in these virtual spaces, therefore approaching the semiotic statute of the enunciative device which hosts the discourse of the actors.