Kristian Bankov

• Professor
• Head of Department at New Bulgarian University

The semiotics of economic transaction is here presented as a new approach to the mechanisms of the transaction of economic value. After analyzing the nature of the main semiotic device for value transactions - the money sign - we identify, at its core, the trust in the future of the economic system of exchange and the scarcity of its availability a...

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, a...

In this chapter I shall first examine a tendency in screen design—their dematerialization and extraordinary proliferation—with important semiotic implications. The inquiry in the first part is mostly concerned with the driving forces of this process which come from the market and the advent of the so called “experience economy”. The conclusions of...

In this chapter I shall examine the new forms of consumer rituals that have emerged after the advent of the world’s biggest social media. I use as a point of reference and a theoretical model the classification of the consumer rituals as “instruments for meaning transfer”, as describe in the famous book by Grant McCracken Culture and Consumption (M...

In the second chapter of this part I intend to examine the key notion of interactivity as a ground for another paradigmatic shift of the science of signs, one aimed at keeping pace with digital transformation of culture. The main point is to stress that the textualist approach, methodologically the most developed form of semiotics, is not efficient...

In this chapter, I shall look at the relationship between methodological textualism and eroticism and how this relationship develops in the digital culture, the age of hypertextualism. The starting point is the work of Roland Barthes on the concept of text and especially The Pleasure of the Text (1973), where we find enough evidence that the attitu...

The aim of this chapter is to define the bigger picture of the book. It will explore digital culture in general using the tools of cultural semiotics, and in particular the Semiosphere model. Web 2.0 platforms are considered the main cultural dispositive of our time and the most typical way in which the Internet shapes digital culture. Most of the...

In this chapter I will trace the evolution of football since 1990, with a primary focus on comparing it to the situation prior to that year, and highlighting essential elements of its transformation into avant-garde experience economy. This is the less semiotic of all chapters. The theoretical reflections rely on market data, statistical evidence a...

The basis of this study is the encyclopedic model of culture by Umberto Eco. Even before I turned my interest towards education in the digital age, I was struck by Eco's idea of the encyclopedia conceived in the early 1970s: one which quite accurately predicted the structure of information on the Internet. My main hypothesis concerns the formation...

In 2018 the Istanbul Convention (IC) was declared unconstitutional in Bulgaria. The decision was taken after several months of fierce public debate among the Bulgarian people mostly on the Social media about the consequences of the adoption of the IC. The debate was dominated by a populist position which rejected the document. From this debate, the...

In the first part of the chapter, I shall summarize the most important findings of the semiotic study of the money sign. In order to comprehend the essential feature of digital money, it will be necessary to undertake a tripartition of the main types of money sign: namely commodity money; representative money and fiat money. I shall then employ thi...

This chapter first examines the history and the role of the Bulgarian flag in the process of constitution of the Bulgarian national identity, starting from the second half of the ninetieth century. Afterwards is designed a semiotic model of the identity, which puts the major accent on its constructed character and its communicative flexibility whil...

Semiotics of transaction is presented here as a new approach, oriented towards the semiotic mechanisms of the transaction of economic value. After analyzing the nature of the main semiotic device for value transactions—the money sign—we have identified in its core the trust in the future of the economic system of exchange and the scarcity of its av...

This chapter is rather descriptive than analytical, with the aim to provide a semiotic insight into the substantial cultural changes in the way sexuality is experienced in the age of the internet. The main focus is on the way new communication technologies and the mechanisms of Web 2.0 have changed the intimate relations, how they have commercializ...

In this chapter, I will be exploring some of the implications of copyright, following existing research on the way in which new digital technologies provide an effective interactive experience. The semiotic core of the issue lies in the fact that the standard concept of copyright is linked to the textualist notion of fixation of any discourse of cr...

After the cultural explosion of Web 2.0, digital culture reveals an apparently semiotic paradox associated with the incredibly widespread use of images of faces, while at the same time the reason to trust in the authenticity of these faces is constantly declining. This is because graphic technology has made the sophisticated manipulation of images...

In the first part of the paper, I shall offer a brief overview of a hypothesis developed in another publication, which explores the relationship between the primordial feeling of trust that each person’s face elicits to varying degrees and how this represents a type of capital for influencers. In the second part of the paper, I shall develop this m...

This chapter first examines the history and role of the Bulgarian flag in the constitution of Bulgarian national identity, a process which began in the second half of the nineteenth century. It then proposes a semiotic model of the identity, one that centers its constructed character and flexibility while performing social interactions. A basic div...

This paper explores digital culture with the tools of cultural semiotics in general, and then employing the semiosphere model in particular. Web 2.0 platforms are taken as the major cultural dispositive of our time, as the most representative way in which the internet shapes digital culture. Most of the global population is currently immersed in di...

In 2018 the Bulgarian Constitutional Court declared the Istanbul Convention (IC) unconstitutional. This decision was taken after several months of fierce public debate in Bulgaria over the implications of IC adoption. The debate was overwhelmed by the populist position rejecting this convention. From this debate the word “gender,” literally transcr...

In this paper I examine the relation between textualism and eroticism and how this relation evolves in the digital age. The point of departure is Roland Barthes’ works on the notion of text and especially The pleasure of the text (1973), where we find enough evidence that the attitude of the French semiologist is of fetishistic character with expli...

This second volume of our journal addresses an uneasy topic. It is uneasy exactly because it is too easy to speak about love and sex and yet say nothing. It is uneasy because there has not been tremendous academic interest in this topic within the field of humanities and social sciences, and contributions to the field have thus been sporadic and un...

This second issue of our journal addresses an uneasy topic. It is uneasy exactly because it is too easy to speak about love and sex and yet say nothing. It is uneasy because there has not been tremendous academic interest in this topic within the field of humanities and social sciences, and contributions to the field have thus been sporadic and uns...

In the first part of the paper, I am summarizing the most relevant findings of the semiotic study of the money sign. It starts with a tripartition of the major types, namely commodity money, representative money, and fiat money. I then use this approach in order to position the most important contributions of other authors from semiotics and surrou...

In this paper I compare and synthesize three separate discourses on marketing communication and propose a model for symbolic added value, a quality that characterizes the most memorable brands. Kevin Lane Keller (Strategic Brand Management, 2013) exhaustively outlines the pragmatic steps for building, managing and measuring strong brands, but his a...

Before being the title of our new journal, Digital age in semiotics and communication was a short definition of the research program of the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University. Of course, today speaking of a “unified program” in the humanities is a utopian act, given the nature of our communities, the hype...

The goal of this chapter is to show how the last 30 years in Bulgaria have witnessed a remarkable variety of consumer cultures, determined by the tumultuous socioeconomic changes in Europe and throughout the world. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to a general outline of the advent of consumer society in Bulgaria from the socialist period...

In this paper first I examine a tendency in the design of the screens - their dematerialization and extraordinary proliferation - with important semiotic implications. The inquiry in the first part is mostly concerned with the driving forces of this process coming from the market and the advent of the so called 'experience economy'. The conclusions...

The idea of writing this paper comes after years of observation of the cognitive attitudes of our students, in particular their approach to knowledge and information and their tactics in demonstrating their acquisition of it during various types of exams. The backbone of the study is Eco's model of culture as encyclopedia. Even before my interest i...

This article is a discussion of the critical remarks raised by Kristian Bankov in a notion called Bankov’s razor, about some foundational elements of the biosemiotic paradigm. The elaborated form of the “razor” includes three main questions on biosemiotic ideas, namely: 1) the philosophical grounds of the biosemiotic discourse, 2) the scientific ou...

The present essay considers some possibilities of achieving objectivity in the knowledge of social facts and of other people in general, guided by the Peircean doctrine of the achievement of objectivity in natural sciences. I propose a direction for a typology of signs (in the largest possible sense of the word), based on the kind of resistance tha...