This is an impressive content for the journal’s first issues, and contributors are thanked, as are the editors and associate editors for their assistance in review and generally bringing the journal to this point.
The contributions to this issue might appear divergent in their sourcing and concepts. However, in view of possible emergent discourse that this publication encourages, and in the terms of Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli, their richness together serves as a trace and a stimulus for a polyphony of free indirect discourse, a Peircean community of inquiry and a pre-sequence to informed intellectual conversations about the terms by which semiotics takes its place not only as an end in itself, but as a window and tool to clarify issues and questions at the heart of contemporary culture, and to begin to make contributions to public life. As Ponzio and Petrilli suggest, media extends and facilitates the possibilities of discourse such as this, and semiotics can help explain and also contribute to the transformative effect of media forms on literacy and on intellectual discourse. We seek in electronic (as well as print) pages, a conduit for individual papers of merit, but also an emerging conversation between interested participants, starting with authors, about contemporary semiosis as it underpins and comprehends key directions of our culture, politics, arts, education and behaviour.