Os códigos digitais: a ascensão e a queda de um paradigma

Winfried Nöth

doi:10.15448/1980-3729.2025.1.46174

Authors

Winfried Nöth Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), São Paulo, SP, Brazil. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2518-9773

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2025.1.46174

Keywords:

digital, binary, code, Polybius, C. S. Peirce

Abstract

This paper examines the concepts of the digital and the digital age and presents the following reflections on the rise and fall of the prestige of binary digital codes: (1) origins of the digitization of the alphabet with Polybius’s pyrotelegraphic code in Greek antiquity, (2) the invention of the maximally economic binary code of the alphabet by Francis Bacon, (3) the binary codes of the 18th century (George Murray, John Gamble), (4) structures of the quasi-digital Morse code, (5) C. S. Peirce’s proposal for a digital telegraph code, (6) the reputation of the digital in the era of semiotic structuralism (Jakobson and Barthes), (7) the place of the digital in the framework of semiotic theories of the symbol (Peirce and Lacan), and (8) the decline of the prestige of digital codes with the post-structuralists (Baudrillard, Massumi, Stiegler).

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Author Biography

Winfried Nöth, Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), São Paulo, SP, Brazil.

Doctor of Philosophy and lecturer, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Professor of the Graduate Program in Intelligence Technologies and Digital Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), in São Paulo, SP, Brazil. Professor of linguistics and semiotics and director of the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Kassel.

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