The semiotics of infobesity: power, post-truth and the algorithmic society
Contemporary societies are not suffering from a lack of information but from its uncontrolled excess. This condition, which was given the name of “infobesity”, profoundly transforms how meaning, truth and authority circulate within political and cultural communication. In a media ecosystem dominated by algorithmic amplification, political actors increasingly operate through strategies that privilege emotional resonance, spectacle and narrative disruption over evidential discourse.
This keynote approaches post-truth communication as a fundamentally semiotic problem. Drawing on cultural and media semiotics, it examines how intermedial environments, where political rhetoric, digital platforms, artistic practices and AI-generated content constantly translate and reframe one another, reshape the processes through which signs acquire credibility.
Cases such as the communicative style of Donald Trump and other particularly verbally-aggressive politicians, illustrate how provocation, narrative diversion and scandal cycles can function as powerful semiotic strategies, often redirecting public attention from structural political issues to endless streams of symbolic conflict (see the case of the Epstein files). At the same time, geopolitical crises and wars increasingly operate within this saturated information economy, where visibility, distraction and narrative control become central political resources.
By analysing examples from political communication, culture and the arts, the lecture argues that contemporary intermediality is producing a form of semiotic inflation, in which the proliferation of signs paradoxically erodes their capacity to signify reliably. Understanding this condition requires rethinking the ethics and ecology of meaning in the age of algorithmic communication.
Key-words: Semiotics, Post-truth, Infobesity, Artificial Intelligence, Political communication
Bio:
Prof. Dr. Dario Martinelli (1974) is a Full Professor in History and Theory of Arts at Kaunas University of Technology, Adjunct Professor in Semiotics and Musicology at the University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor in Semiotics and Communication Studies at Lapland University. As of 2026, he has published 20 authored monographs and ca. 200 among edited collections, studies and scientific articles. Besides his affiliations, he has been a visiting professor in numerous academic institutions, and has been a recipient of several prizes, including, in 2006, a knighthood from the Italian Republic for his contribution to Italian culture.
