disembodiment and hyperreality. The corruptive influence of this problematics is detectable in the section devoted to the digital media that Winfried Noth included in his volume on recent developments in media semiotics (Noth 1997). Be that as it may, in covering issues like chatting, electronic communities and the hypertext, the articles comprising this section were sure evidence that the younger generation of semioticians was starting to rise to the challenge of digital developments. But for a few exceptions (e.g. Jeanneret 1999, Codognet 2002), however, semiotics, and especially media semiotics, is conspicuously absent from the crucial debates and developments of the time in media theory and research. In 2010, Marcel Danesi expresses his intimation that 'a primary aim of media semiotics' is to study the implications of the general 'semiotic law of media', according to which 'as the media change, so too the sign systems of culture' (Danesi 2010: 135, see also Danesi 2015: 485). By restating, in effect, in semiotic terms, Marshall McLuhan's controversial aphorism that 'the medium is the message', Danesi seems to favor the disentanglement of media semiotics from its customary focus on media representations and endorse the redirection of its attention to the bewildering scale and variety of semiotic changes and innovations spawned by the digital revolution. He proves reluctant, though, to flesh out this crucial intimation into a new research agenda for media semiotics in the digital era. Rather condescendingly, in fact, he describes the Internet as 'the primary platform for enacting the carnivalesque within us', convinced that its importance resides mainly in in role as a medium of parody pop culture or 'indie' culture (Danesi 2010: 148). Danesi is convinced that media semiotics 'can provide relevant insights into the interconnection between technology and culture, perhaps like no other discipline can' (ibid). Once again, though, he fails to spell out the significance of this crucial point for the semiotic research agenda. The rise of the Web-centered communication environment has brought to the fore the issue of the technology-culture interface with a force and urgency, that no previous technology has ever done before. Semiotics is indeed in a privileged position to apprehend this interface as encompassing simultaneously the interaction of humans with machines and the mediated interaction between humans. But this potential has yet to be developed. In the tradition of Kittler's notion of 'semiotechnologies' (Kittler 1997), both Noth's notion of 'semiotic machines' (Noth 2002) and Jeanneret's notion of 'le techno-semiotique' (Jeanneret 2014) address the heterogenous assemblages of technological and meaningmaking operations characteristic of digital media in an explicitly negative manner, intended, as they are, to castigate the domination of technology over meaning. A much more fertile perspective has been developed by the actor-network theory (ANT) of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law, whose 'material-semiot...