ABSTRACT
During this first quarter of the twenty-first century, political developments around the world have punctuated the reality that our digital media play a discernible role in stoking the flames of moral outrage among the public writ large. Indeed, the ways in which moral outrage is expressed and experienced within contemporary existence are intrinsically shaped by the translative processes of a-signifying digital machinery as it circulates mediated representations of our political reality. Borrowing from Susan Petrilli’s theory of translative semiotics, this chapter presents a semiotic examination of the assertion made above, arguing that as digital algorithms assemble and position signs among an arbitrary and precarious assemblage of interpretants within the Internet of things, the meanings and experiences of morality and moral outrage are instantiated collaboratively in a dialogical-dialectic choreography between human minds and their built environments. In the process, the meaning of morality takes on the impermanent character of a floating signifier among an undulating assemblage of equally impermanent interpretants. For better or worse, the human Umwelt is caught in the dialogically dialectic web of cybersemiosic translations, which has transformed the traditional order of political norms and customs, distorting the expression and experience of moral outrage within our contemporary world.
