The semiotic swarm of cyberspace:
Cybergluttony and Internet addiction in the global village
Jean Umiker-Sebeok

Information, knowledge and the semiotic swarm

 The American philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce argued that we come to know the world and ourselves only through a dialogue with members of a community of knowers:
 

What anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community....The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. (Peirce 1931-35: 5.317)
 As Merrell (1995: 128 ff.) notes, this hypothetical 'state of complete information' - "where absolute difference meets absolute sameness"- would be an asemiotic one. By contrast, our generation of knowledge through dialogue with members of a community of knowers can be seen as a multiresolutional process of incomplete 'differences which make a difference' (Gregory Bateson's 1972 definition of 'information'). We can only indicate what some experience of our world is like (through iconicity and the category of firstness), what it is not (through indexicality and the category of secondness), and what it would be like under some set of conditions (through symbolicity or thirdness) (Merrell 1995: 120 ff.). Because conventional signs (symbols) always rest upon a base of iconicity and indexicality, we usually rely upon all three of these modes of semiosis. Given that iconicity is inherently fuzzy and symbolicity incomplete, our only hope for emerging enlightenment is through the collaborative interpretive work of dialogue, where our interpretations acquire meaning in contrast with those of our interlocutors. From the interpreter's point of view:
 
[T]hese three paths [of Peirce's categories] serve to reinforce the view that signs, and especially symbols, do not 'represent,' 'refer to,' 'stand for,' or 'describe' the furniture of our world. At the very most they provide a guide, a call to action, a set of instructions, by means of which we can more or less experience (relate to) what the symbol emissor once experienced. (Merrell 1995: 123)
Underlying this collaborative, bottom-up, massively parallel production of meaning and knowledge on a macroscopic level is the 'swarm intelligence' of the body (Hoffmeyer 1995). At this higher, endosemiotic level of resolution or knowing, the same principle of dialogue prevails:
 
[A]nimal and plant organisms should be regarded as a self-organizing chaos of elements, cells, or pieces of tissue all working their way, more or less independently, to a plan of action that will work for the survival of the organism. And if we turn our attention to an animal's capacity for intelligent behavior, we will discover the aptness...of the term swarm intelligence....The brain is...immersed in the immune system's floating morass of physicality and the cognitive scientists' search for the brain's supreme center -- or 'central processor'‹has proved futile. There do not appear to be any such centers or processors. Rather than the brain being pre-programmed to produce intelligence, intelligence seems to swarm out of it. (Hoffmeyer 1996: 113-114)
Swarm intelligence is made possible by a system of sign processes which Hoffmeyer (1996: 125) calls an inner semiosphere, comparable to the outer semiosphere required by communities of knowers or semiotic agents. The distinction between 'outer' and 'inner' is to be avoided, however, because there are clear similarities between the swarm intelligence within the individual body and within the body politic (cf. Minsky 1987). Most important of these is that the process of sign interpretation is situational, embodied, emergent and communal. It is useful, in fact, to 'blow up' the similarities between the 'swarm' of the body and the 'community' of interpreting semiotic agents to which Peirce refers, and so, at the risk of at least temporarily narcotizing distinctions which need to be made lest post-humanists make hay out of the metonymic relationship between swarms and insects, in this paper I have chosen to replace the sign 'community' with 'swarm' in order to highlight the process of interpretive structuration over causative structure. Reframing Peirce's words, we get: reality depends on the ultimate decision of the swarm.

Global swarm is in some ways a more apt metaphor for modern, 'wired' life than is global village or global network. It captures the unbounded, self-organizing, rhizomatic nature of cyberspace, where every interpretive point can and must be connected with every other point, where millions of semiotic trails or traces can be erased, reversed, and continually modified, and where there is no inside or outside and hence no possibility of a global description 'from the outside' but only a kind of 'blind groping' following some 'myopic algorithm' made possible through countless dialogic encounters (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; cf. Eco 1984). Ironically, the individual inhabitants of the 'global village' seem to be in a position only to think and act locally, rather than globally, and putting their faith in the hope that their individual blind wanderings will nevertheless, through communion with others, lead to knowledge on the level of the swarm.

Swarm intelligence and positive power

Peirce's theory of the dialogic nature of knowing emphasizes that it is not some 'thing' or state but rather a form of doing, as expressed in his pragmatic maxim. The French philosopher and historian of ideas Michel Foucault (1965, 1980) elucidates this maxim, demonstrating how the discursive construction of knowledge involves the use of 'disciplining technologies' or forms of interaction which are used to create the disciplined selves and bodies that underlie the bottom-up, 'positive power' on which social order depends. Knowing, which requires collaborative interaction, is an exercise in power and control rather than some objective debate or discussion about what the world is like among swarming semiotic agents. According to Foucault's model of positive power:
 

Disciplining technologies are attractive because they offer increased levels of expertise or skills in exchange for submission to group consensus about the status of 'reality'. For example, at the family dinner -- perhaps the quintessential disciplining technology of human culture -- , family members negotiate the 'reality' of both themselves and their place in the group through the intricate rituals for both the exchange of words and conjoint production of meaning through nonverbal signs such as seating arrangements, table settings, gestures, facial expressions, and the food itself. As Stacey notes, "Enjoyment of food (and the rituals that codify and often intensify the enjoyment) is knit into the very fabric of society, acting as a civilizer, a bond between peoples" (1994: 207). Seen from Foucault's perspective, the individual family member agrees to be bound by the family's ever-developing communal definition of him- or herself  -- to self-police his interpretations and actions - in exchange for potential increases in her level of control through the skills and competencies the dinner ritual provides. The interpretive skills involved in the family's table, culinary and conversational etiquette provide the individual with tools for 'doing their knowing' both in the family circle and outside it and hence promise enhanced control and power. Equally important, the dining ritual, like all rituals, produces ritualized bodies which are then capable of serving as stages for further ritual action (Bell 1992).

Needless-to-say, there is no guarantee that this exchange will be a balanced one. Foucault (1965, 1980, 1988, 1990) and the sociologist Goffman (e.g., 1961, 1964), among others, have demonstrated this in their descriptions of the use of positive power by the few to subjugate those they have stigmatized as 'mentally ill', 'criminal', or 'physically disabled'. Today we like to call such persons 'challenged' or 'impaired' in a vain attempt to pretend that we have thus avoided labeling them and thereby signaling that they are damaged selves in need of surveillance and what Goffman called 'repair work'-- recuperative action which always involves considerable reduction in their control of their own lives.

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