SEMIOVOX 1Q2025

Broadcast by Josh Glenn, Posted March 31, 2025

I’m cofounder of the semiotics-fueled branding consultancy SEMIOVOX, editor of the consultancy’s eponymous website, and I’m founding coordinator of the monthly SEMIOFEST SESSIONS. Here’s a round-up of what we’ve been doing during 1Q2025.

Also see: SEMIOVOX 2022 | SEMIOVOX 2023 | SEMIOVOX 2024

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

SEMIOVOX’s methodology provides insight and inspiration — to brand and organization strategy, marketing, design, innovation, and consumer insights teams, as well as to their agency partners — regarding the unspoken local/global “codes” that help shape perceptions of and guide behavior within product categories and/or sociocultural territories.

In February, at the Market Research Society’s Semiotics and Cultural Insights 2025 conference in London, Konrad Collao of the media and entertainment research agency Craft and Laurie Kearns, an insights manager for BBC Studios, presented on “how UK stories land in US culture.” They discussed an ambitious 2024 project to which Ramona Lyons and I, after having analyzed / analysed 160 hours of British TV, contributed, among other things, the chart shown here.

During 1Q2025, I’ve taken time off from semio projects while my wife and I work on downsizing and relocating, in search of new adventures away from our long-time home in Boston.

SEMIOFEST SESSIONS

I’m cofounder of and “convenor” for SEMIOFEST SESSIONS, a monthly-ish series of online get-togethers — put on under the aegis of the biannual Semiofest conference — intended not only to share best practices among, but to nurture collegiality and friendship within the global semio community. Here’s the 1Q2025 lineup:

JANUARY: MEDICAL SEMIOTICS. Medical professionals increasingly recognize that the molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids with which we come in contact initiate sequences of semiotic transformations in our bodies. Also, medicine is more than chemistry: How a society regards medicine, health, and disease is itself influenced by semiotic codes. Yogi Hendlin invited Ramona Lyons and John Tredinnick-Rowe to discuss the current state — and future — of medical semiotics.

FEBRUARY: PEIRCE & PERCEPTION. Rejecting the “mirror” model of cognition that underpins our conventional view of perception, Peirce argues that signs are made by each of us, as we seek to understand the world around us. This is how we become integrated in our own cultures. Chris Barnham discussed the implications of Peirce’s model for commercial semiotics; and Serdar Paktin described what happens when the Western model of perception is imposed upon non-Western cultures.

MARCH: SEMIOTICS & SPIRITUALITY. The experience of doing semiotics can engender a feeling of unreality — which is not dissimilar to those experiences that might be described as mystical, sublime, or spiritual. Although (most) semioticians are not mystics, like spiritual seekers we are very much in pursuit of the ineffable. Adelina Vaca invited Roman Esqueda, Malex Salamanques, and Alfredo Troncoso to offer perspectives on the meaning, and the lived experience, of “spirituality.”

Coming up in 2Q2025:

Gemma Jones will host a session on THE SEMIOTICS OF PLACE | Louise Jolly and Al Deakin will host a session on THE RISE OF THE RIGHT | Aiyana Gunjan will host a session on ART & SEMIOTICS.

All SEMIOFEST SESSIONS here.

SEMIOVOX.COM

I’m the editor here at SEMIOVOX, our consultancy’s eponymous website. Here’s what we published during 1Q2025.

MAKING SENSE is an ongoing series of Q&As dedicated to understanding what makes semioticians tick. I’ve asked my commercial-semiotics colleagues from around the world to answer a set of leading questions. Here’s the 1Q2025 MAKING SENSE lineup:

“Semiotics is too often perceived as an obscure ‘theory’ (this term is used to suggest gobbledygook) from the humanities, one that therefore has no applicability practically, nor rigor scientifically. In fact, the situation is the exact opposite. Semiotics is one of the few methodologies serving as a bridge between the arts and the sciences. Its practical significance is a still mostly untapped resource for those with the vision to put the method to use.”
Brian Khumalo

Coming up in 2Q2025:

All MAKING SENSE installments here.

The CASE FILE series — the contributors to which are commercial semioticians from around the world — shares stories of things we were amazed and amused to learn, whether or not they proved useful to the client. Here’s the 1Q2025 CASE FILE lineup:

I could not get the stories of these teenagers out of my head; I found it hard to naturalize the adverse reality I had witnessed firsthand. Several teens had mentioned to me an NGO they visited because it had a community dining room and recreational workshops. I went to the NGO’s website and found a volunteer form; and — in November 2020 — for the first time I paid a visit to the neighborhood I’d been studying. I’ve been volunteering there ever since, organizing vocational training courses and teaching school support classes.
Ximena Tobi

That’s a wrap for this series!

Coming up, a new global-semio series: PHOTO OP. Here’s the 2Q2025 lineup:

Via the solo series CASABLANCA CODES, I’m developing a thick description of Casablanca‘s codes and thematic complexes. Series of eight, a new installment each month. Here’s the 1Q2025 lineup:

FERRARI: “Ferrari isn’t being impulsively generous — if he was, he’d go ahead and smuggle Victor and Ilsa out himself, free of charge — or at a reduced price. Instead, his shrewd observation of Rick’s behavior regarding Ilsa has encouraged the chess master to attempt, yet again, to reactivate Rick’s sense of morality and compassion. True, if he succeeds in this gambit, he’ll lose access to the letters of transit… but unlike everyone else in the movie, Ferrari seems cynically aware that these are just a MacGuffin.”

LASZLO: “Laszlo does not succumb to this rhetoric. Standing up — which helps counteract the sense that he is a schoolboy being lectured to by a superior — he announces, “I’ve never accepted that privilege, and I’m now on French soil.” This is how a counter-discourse operates: It doesn’t accept. Laszlo refuses to accept consensus reality; he rejects the counsel of experts and authority figures. He is being the change he wants to see in the world.”

STRASSER: “As an autocratic, Gestapo-adjacent figure, Major Strasser is prickly, to say the least, whenever Renault or Laszlo says anything that seems to contradict the Nazi party line. He is forever taking offense, and misses no opportunity to instruct his interlocutors on how they should see, think, feel, and speak about the Reich. Which he would have everyone regard as a natural, permanent, and inevitable phenomenon.”

Here’s the 2Q2025 lineup:

ILSA | UGARTE | YVONNE.

“If Eternity Should Fail” (Strange Tales, November 1965)

The series SCHEMATIZING, which is cross-posted from our sister website HILOBROW, attempts to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a G-schema. Here’s the 1Q2025 lineup:

A FECUND VOID | A WORLD WITHIN A WORLD! | HOVERING RIGHT THERE…

Here’s the 2Q2025 lineup:

SOLITUDE-FUNNEL | DESPERATE STRUGGLE | TENSEGRITY.

The latest series in the POP BESTIARY project, which analyzes the evolving meaning of animals in 20th-century pop culture, is on the mouse. (Cross-posted from HILOBROW.) Here’s the 1Q2025 lineup:

HUNCA MUNCA | JOHNNY MOUSE.

Hunca Munca tried every tin spoon in turn; the fish was glued to the dish. Then Tom Thumb lost his temper. He put the ham in the middle of the floor, and hit it with the tongs and with the shovel — bang, bang, smash, smash!
Beatrix Potter

Here’s the 2Q2025 lineup:

MICKEY | AMOS | HERMAN.

SEMIOVOX continues to offer glimpses into various audits we’ve done via installments in the long-running series CODE-X. Here’s a selection of CODE-X installments from 1Q2025:

Also see: SEMIOVOX updates from 2022 | 2023 | 2024

MIT PRESS: RADIUM AGE

I’m the founding editor of the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE proto-sf reissue series. During 1Q2025, we published the following titles.

J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (March 2025, with a new introduction by Ted Chiang). “Extravagance… but of so remarkable a character that it keeps you almost spell-bound. What follows is philosophy, psychology, poetry, allegory, what you will.” — The Bookman (1911) | See this title at the MIT Press website.
John Taine’s The Greatest Adventure (March 2025, with a new introduction by S.L. Huang). “A mixture of H. Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Roy Chapman Andrews, and a bottle of excellent gin.” — California Tech (1929) | See this title at the MIT Press website.

More RADIUM AGE series updates: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025

HILOBROW

HILOBROW is SEMIOVOX’s sister website. Here are a few semio- and cultural analysis-related series and posts from 1Q2025.

SEMIOPUNK is an irregular series, written by Josh Glenn, dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s a sampling of the 1Q2025 lineup:

Samuel R. Delany’s THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION. Excerpt: “All of us inhabit a cultural system whose lineaments are invisible, inherited, and seemingly natural and inevitable. Our perceptions are warped by this system, our values and decisions influenced by it, our actions to some extent guided by it. We’ve inherited it, but we don’t entirely understand it…”
Roger Zelazny’s LORD OF LIGHT. Excerpt: “The Hindu pantheon of “gods” are not considered separate gods in their own right; they are useful illusions generated in order to give mortals an object lesson in restoring Dharma. There’s a parallel between this religious tradition and semiotics, which understands each “node” in a network of meaning to be merely a symbol or metaphor for some underlying, impossible-to-represent meaning.”
Philip K. Dick’s UBIK. Excerpt: “Joe Chip finds himself immersed in an alien semiosphere, if you will: This altered reality in which he and his teammates are moving back in time, in which things keep crumbling and dissolving, and in which Runciter keeps manifesting in unexpected ways. So Joe does what semioticians do: He analyzes the semiosphere’s norms and forms, seeking patterns that might reveal insights about what’s going on… and how what’s going on is going on.”

More HILOBROW updates: 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025

On to 2Q2025…

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SEMIOVOX 1Q2025

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