Semiosis in Artificial Intelligence-Mediated Environments: Exploring the Signs of Social Media Burnout

This chapter focuses on digitally mediated communication, particularly within Social media platforms using Artificial Intelligence recommendation systems. Artificial Intelligence recommendations provide users with constant stimuli encouraging online engagement. Overstimulation, including excessive interactions online, may lead to various stress conditions, including digital burnout, a mental and physical state of fatigue and helplessness. Digital burnout is recognised in individuals experiencing strong effects of stress in situations when their physical self remains outside the communication process but is mainly exposed to digitally mediated stimuli. The revision of Social media’s influence on their users is done by constructing the connections between data-driven cognitive science methodologies and the interpretive tools of cultural psychology and semiotics. This chapter aims to create bridges between neuroscience, psychology and biosemiotics to provide valuable tools to better understand how communication within Social media can lead to stress disorders such as digital burnout.