Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: Semiotic foundations of the media -- Media and self-reference: The forgotten initial state -- Media between Balnibarbi and Plato's Cave -- The multimediation of the lifeworld -- The sign as medium, the medium relation as the foundation of the sign -- Semiosis of the mass media: Modeling a complex process -- The media contract -- Part II: Pictorial and graphic semiotics -- Semiotics and ethics: The image of semiotics and semiotics of the image -- The prephotographic, the photographic, and the postphotographic image -- Can pictures lie? -- On the semiotics of the image and the computer image -- Pictorial metaphor in commercial advertising -- Representation and legitimacy: A semiotic approach to the logo -- Indexical/iconic tensions: The semiotics of the postage stamp -- Combining the information of maps and other media while hiking -- Part III: Film, acting, and intermediality in the movies -- The delay of the cinema age -- The dialectic of the sign or journeys to Cape Fear -- Natural born killers: Rhythms of the filmic image and styles of violence -- "How did you find us?" - "We read the script!": A special case of self-reference in the movies -- Words created in their own image -- Discursive stupidity: Abduction and comic in "Monty Python's Flying Circus"; From Peirce to Freud -- The semiotics of eating and orality in the movies -- Star images: Questions for semiotic analysis -- Film acting and gender: Method acting and the male tantrum -- On some aspects of intermedial film transfer -- Media shift and intertextual reference -- Death and rebirth of the author: On a specific case of an intermedial chiasmus between literature and film -- Part IV: Television, video, and radio -- Television: The semiotic phenomenology of communication and the image -- Where is the subject in the macromedia? The question of zapping -- The surrogate audience: Ostension of spectator response in televised shows -- Liquid images: A semiotic analysis of on-air promotion and TV design of TV stations -- Foreshadowing virtual reality in narrative and film -- TV is dead, video is born: Dialogue on new intermedia communication -- Audience participation games: Consideration for parties other than the actual participant -- Part V: Computers, electronic networks, hypertext, and cyberspace -- Objects and the world metaphor: A semiotic engineering approach -- Semiotics of computer media in architecture -- "Electronic communities" as social worlds: Toward a sociosemiotic analysis of computer mediated interpersonal communication -- The cold warmth of communication in computer networks -- Semiosis at computer media -- Hypertextuality and multimedia literature -- Linguistic orientation in computational space -- Principles of spatialization in text and hypertext -- Part VI: Time, memory, media, and the semiotics of the museum -- The medium is the memory: Ars memoriae in its age of technical reproducibility -- The role of memory in the contemporary acceleration of cultural proliferation -- Listening to the virtual past -- The museum as a political media: A semiological assault -- The museum as semiotic frame: "Degenerate art" in the thirties and the nineties -- Western heritage and its autres: Cowboys and Indians, facts, and fictions -- Part VII: Aesthetic aspects of the media -- Innovation, gainful learning, and habits in the aesthetics of media -- Deep structure and design configurations in paintings -- Architecture as a mass medium? -- Poems on the bus: Some practical aspects of the reception of poetry in the mass media -- The form of the media: The intermediality of visual poetry -- Poetic aspects of a multimedia text -- Graphic notation and musical graphics: The nonnotational sign systems in new music and its multimedial, intermedial, extended-medial, and mixed-medial character -- Part VIII: Sociosemiotics and today's myths in the media -- Divination as a mass media event -- Media, death, and democracy -- Myth of the Occident and its manifestations in the Chinese media -- Media coverage of the unreasonable in the land of hyperreason -- The media and logic of concrete action in the "housekeeping" press -- The desire of "crises": An Occidental way of existing -- Invitation to travel: The window-shop relationship in the communication of fashion -- Nonverbal signs in an intercultural business negotiation -- Part IX: Appendix -- Index of names -- Index of subjects