Nothing is without a Sign. The Map and the Representation of the World: Two Case Studies

Knowing how to find orientation in the space surrounding you, made once the difference between life and death. The orientation makes the action of mapping a human attitude that simply does not belong to the world of graphic techniques or the arts but it resides deeply in the human being with a conscience and a mind: mapping is thinking the landscape. The world is reflected in the way we build our way of thinking, as it is filled with our mappings through the various manifestations of our living space, of our way to occupy places and of pointing out the names. This happened both in the material world and in its digital dimension. The languages we use witness this exchange. They reveal the spatial dimension of our thinking. The relation between man and nature is described by a system of organized signs: the language, the first evolving mapping. Between the different languages the photographic one reveals, on a closer look, the collective mappings standing out from the indistinct landscape: it directs our look towards it allowing us to read the cosmogonies that symbolically govern it so as we can for orient inside.

Keywords: Mapping, geotagging, landscape, orienting, web

Fabio Fornasari, Nulla è senza un segno. La mappa e la rappresentazione del mondo: due casi studio in "SOCIOLOGIA DELLA COMUNICAZIONE " 44/2012, pp 25-48, DOI: 10.3280/SC2012-044003