ABSTRACT
The technology that structures social life necessarily effects changes in modes of expression, allowing us to manage the conceptual shifts which new modes of work and leisure introduce. Technological change introduces neologisms into language, which accrue significance in terms of the way they are inserted into the complex structures of culture. The study of language as a system in which terms derive meaning from their relationship to other terms at a given point in time was initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist whose Course in General Linguistics was influential in initiating the ‘linguistic turn’ that dominated cultural analysis through much of the twentieth century. It would seem, then, that the language of scientism largely creates the reality that it intends to study. Or, alternatively, that empiricism in the social sciences demands a conceptual framework in which signification becomes ossified around a central idea or philosophy so that the range of alternative ideas becomes severely restricted.
