SEMIOVOX 4Q2025

Broadcast by Josh Glenn, Posted December 24, 2025

I’m cofounder of the semiotics-fueled branding consultancy SEMIOVOX, editor of the consultancy’s eponymous website, and I’m founding coordinator of the monthly SEMIOFEST SESSIONS. Here’s a round-up of what we’ve been doing during 4Q2025.

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

SEMIOVOX’s methodology provides insight and inspiration — to brand and organization strategy, marketing, design, innovation, and consumer insights teams, as well as to their agency partners — regarding the unspoken local/global “codes” that help shape perceptions of and guide behavior within product categories and/or sociocultural territories.

During 4Q2025, our projects included (but were not limited to) the following.

CRAFTED BEVERAGE CODES. On behalf of a multinational beverage company, we kicked off a project analyzing Crafted Beverage codes in seven markets worldwide. We’ve enjoyed collaborating on this project with Becks Collins (England), Sarah Johnson of Athena Brand Wisdom (Canada), Labbrand (China), Aya Kanda of Salt (Japan), Mariane Cara of Comunicara (Brazil), and Marion Polauck (Germany). We’ll continue working on this major audit through 1Q2026. Product innovation, brand positioning, marketing optimization, retail design.

Also…

In October, a project for BBC Studios (via the strategic insight agency Craft) to which Ramona Lyons and I contributed a semiotic audit in 2024 was short-listed for a Market Research Society award in the Cultural Insights category. Craft’s study looked at how and why different kinds of British stories land in the USA (or not), and what this means for those at BBC Studios making TV shows — and selling them to the USA.

Ramona and I are proud to have played a role in a project that was short-listed for the MRS’s Cultural Insights award, which each year honors research that “goes beyond traditional data to uncover deep cultural forces, values, and beliefs that drive consumer behavior. “

In November, Ramona Lyons and I spoke (via Zoom) about our work for TV and videogame clients with my friend Michelle Chihara’s USC Cinema & Media Studies class.

Also in November, Adelina Vaca and I interviewed the organizers of Semiofest Warsaw 2026 about the conference’s theme, etc.

SEMIOFEST SESSIONS

I’m the founder and co-convenor (with Adelina Vaca, as of late 2025) of SEMIOFEST SESSIONS, a monthly-ish series of online get-togethers — put on under the aegis of the biannual Semiofest conference — intended not only to share best practices among, but to nurture collegiality and friendship within the global semio community. Here’s the 4Q2025 lineup:

OCTOBER: CASE FILES. We commercial semioticians tend to discover all sorts of things — whether amazing, amusing, or tragic — that challenge our assumptions, make us sit up and say “Wow!” For this session, I invited colleagues from China, Portugal, Argentina, Sweden, Mexico, and Italy to share stories of serendipitous discoveries… and to reveal how these discoveries were received by their clients.

NOVEMBER: DOING SEMIOTICS IN ASIA. As Asia takes a center stage in global cultural and economic flows, semiotic analysis in the region faces unique opportunities and tensions. Coco Wu invited 3 semioticians from different countries in Asia to discuss the ins and outs of semiotics in Asian contexts and how Eastern philosophies — with their emphasis on cyclical rather than linear time, harmony over opposition, and relational identity — might expand the very way we think about meaning-making.

Coming in 1Q2026:

Gabriela Pedranti will host a session on GUILTY PLEASURES | Alfredo Troncoso will host a session on MYTHICAL SEMIOTICS | Mariane Cara will host a session on DOING SEMIOTICS IN LATIN AMERICA.

All SEMIOFEST SESSIONS here.

SEMIOVOX.COM

I’m the editor here at SEMIOVOX, our consultancy’s eponymous website. Here’s what we published during 4Q2025.

A professor advised me, “Give it a try, and if you don’t like it, you can leave.” I quickly came to understand what the semiotics discipline had to offer, and that was 14 unforgettable and transformative years ago. Later, I realized there is a tautological relationship between anthropology and semiotics; explaining one often involves explaining the other. This realization has led me to combine both disciplines seamlessly.
Estefania Rodríguez

MAKING SENSE is an ongoing series of Q&As dedicated to understanding what makes semioticians tick. I’ve asked my commercial-semiotics colleagues from around the world to answer a set of leading questions. Here’s the 4Q2025 lineup:

Coming in 1Q2026:

All MAKING SENSE installments here.

As a movie addict, I’m drawn to these “loaded absences”, where what’s left out often says more than what’s shown. The film captures how normality can become complicit with evil, how indifference can be structural. It doesn’t shout, but it unsettles. And it lingers, like a tension you can’t quite shake off. It’s a sensory experience but also a deeply political one.
Stefania Gogna

MEDIA DIET is a series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — our commercial semiotician colleagues, from around the world — whose “output” we admire. We wrapped up the series during 4Q2025. Here’s the lineup:

The latest series in the POP BESTIARY project, via which I’ve analyzed the evolving meaning of animals in 20th-century pop culture, is dedicated to the mouse. We wrapped up the series (cross-posted from HILOBROW) during 4Q2025. Here’s the lineup:

QUIMBY | PIKACHU

Image courtesy of Nicola Zengiaro. Photo Credit: Guido Becchetti, tattoo artist in LAG TATTOO

TATTOO YOU is a series that will kick off in January. We’ve asked 25 of our semio colleagues from around the world to explicate the symbolism of… one of their own tattoos. Here’s a selection from the 1Q2026 lineup:

Also see: SEMIOVOX updates from 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025.

MIT PRESS: RADIUM AGE

I’m the founding editor of the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE proto-sf reissue series. During 4Q2025 we sent our Spring 2026 titles to press. These are:

E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (March 10), edited and introduced by Alexander B. Joy. “Flaxman Low is the Sherlock Holmes of the ghost world.” — The London Quarterly Review (1900)
Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth (March 31), introduced by Lucy Sante. “A gynarchic state, Armeria, where women marry each other and buy the babies on whom the future of Armeria depends… Readable and suggestive.” — The Occult Review (1909)

In November, via his column for the Financial Times, British sf author James Lovegrove named Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age, an anthology (published earlier this year) that I edited and introduced for the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series, one of the Five Best SF Books of 2025.

Here’s the writeup:

Part of the Radium Age series — reissues and anthologies of early-20th-century science fiction in nattily designed paperback editions — Before Superman assembles stories about superhumans from an era before they achieved comic-book ubiquity. Authors represented include Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Karel Čapek, even George Bernard Shaw. Sheer retro bliss, no spandex.

More RADIUM AGE series updates: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025 | 4Q2025

HILOBROW

HILOBROW is SEMIOVOX’s sister website. Here are a few semio- and cultural analysis-related series and posts from 4Q2025.

SEMIOPUNK is a series via which I’ve surfaced examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s a sampling of the 4Q2025 lineup:

Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea. Excerpt: “The octopuses are presented as a collective, embodied intelligence that communicates through a biologically integrated, non-human symbolic system. Their form of meaning-making is rooted in physical being rather than abstract thought, challenging our human-centric assumptions about what constitutes a ‘mind’.”
Charles Stross’s Glasshouse. Excerpt: “Semioticians living through humankind’s hard-right turn, here in the 2020s, are well-placed to understand and bear witness to the sort of cognitive dictatorship on display in Glasshouse. Historical records are being deleted; collective memories are being altered. The resulting amnesia makes it impossible for people to know the true history of our social and cultural conflicts or the motives behind them, leaving us in a state of historical subjugation.”
Gordon Dahlquist’s The Different Girl. Excerpt: “The intrusion of the ‘different girl’ on Veronika’s island is an epistemological catastrophe. It’s precisely this sort of catastrophe that semioticians attempt to inflict upon ourselves, for each project. And then we attempt to inflict it upon our clients. We attempt to un-know what we thought was natural, normal, eternal, inevitable.”

During 4Q2025, HILOBROW published BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, a serialization of an epistolary dialogue about science fiction (from 2022) between me and the philosopher Mark Kingwell.

Excerpt:

You mention hybridized mash-ups — spy thrillers plus sf, hard-boiled detective plus sf, etc. What I’ve discovered about sf, now that I’ve read scores of novels and stories from the formative 1900–1935 era, i.e., before John Campbell, et al., started policing the genre’s borders, is that it’s all hybridized mashups, all the way down.
Josh

Here’s the BROKEN KNOWLEDGE lineup:

More HILOBROW updates: 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025 | 4Q2025

On to 1Q2026…

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