From Capturing Attention to Meaningful Connection
Brands today operate in an environment of permanent stimulation. Every platform, feed and interface competes for immediate reaction: more content, more signals, more emotional triggers.
At the same time, AI dramatically increases the volume of communication being produced, with content being made faster, cheaper and increasingly optimized for performance.
In this context, the challenge for brands is no longer simply visibility.
The real question is: How do brands create meaning without contributing to sensory exhaustion, polarization or empty cultural noise?
This also changes the role for researchers, strategists and designers. Encoding messages is no longer only about persuasion or differentiation; it is increasingly about responsibility as it shapes perceptual realities, emotional climates, and collective sensitivities.
The New Challenges of Meaning Production
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Communication no longer targets only attention but the whole nervous system
Much of today’s communication is designed to interrupt: outrage, urgency, moral provocation or emotional intensity are used to stop people mid-scroll.
The result is a media culture built on affective reaction rather than reflection. Communication becomes louder, more polarized and increasingly exhausting.
The challenge is therefore not only how to gain attention, but how to communicate responsibly in environments of sensory overload. -
Brands increasingly create social divides instead of shared meaning
Brands once differentiated mainly through taste, aspiration or lifestyle.
Today, many brands operate through moral positioning and identity signaling. Consumption choices become markers of belonging and opposition.
Communication no longer only speaks to communities, it actively produces them by reinforcing distinctions between “us” and “them”.
The risk is that we create less shared cultural meaning and instead amplify cultural divide. -
AI creates efficiency but also semantic flattening
AI-generated communication is based on probability and pattern recognition. It reproduces what is statistically plausible, recognizable and "optimizes" it.
This creates a paradox:
the more communication is optimized, the more interchangeable it can become.
When meaning production itself becomes automated, this arguably goes one step beyond the loss of aura Walter Benjamin described in relation to mechanical reproduction.
Brands risk producing content that is highly performative, but emotionally hollow and soulless.
AI is extremely effective at reproducing existing codes. But genuinely new meaning or cultural depth often emerge from ambiguity and tension, shown in personal perspectives and voices as well as lived experiences, which are precisely the things AI lacks and optimization tends to eliminate.
Implications: Towards More Responsible Meaning-Making
For semioticians, strategists and creatives, the task is to create resonance.
It is important to understand resonance not simply as triggered affect, but as the emergence of meaning, sense and connection.
Perhaps the future task is to focus on:
- communication that leaves room for interpretation instead of instant reaction,
- narratives that connect rather than divide,
- aesthetics that reduce noise instead of amplifying it,
- and brand worlds that create presence rather than permanent stimulation.
- In a culture of excess signaling, restraint itself can become meaningful.
As digital mediation and now AI become unavoidable parts of communication, the responsibility of brands increases.
The central question is no longer only:
How do we capture attention?
But:
What kinds of perception, relationships and realities do our signs help create?
Semiotics can help us remain aware of the realities our signs help create and guide choices that optimize for cultural depth and coherence rather than engagement metrics.
Image via @artwork_journey on Instagram