Writing, Ideas & Thought

What happens when technologies that promise access to employment also shape how people describe themselves and imagine their futures? Taking AI-mediated job seeking as its point of departure, this chapter reads Lewis Carroll's chessboard world as a model of the relationship between rules, positions, and possible transformations. It examines how automated applications, CV optimisation, matching, and career recommendations translate lived trajectories into machine-legible profiles. Drawing on cultural psychology, semiotic mediation, and social theory, the chapter proposes three connected analytical notions: the labour market as a semiotic device of futurisation, AI as a normative curator of the Self, and algorithmically canalised imagination. These notions illuminate how visibility, recognition, and imagined futures are reorganised without rendering job seekers passive. The chapter differentiates algorithmic selection from the broader social conditions of employment, identifies tensions between standardisation and cultural plurality, and outlines empirical questions for a cultural psychology of algorithmic mediation.

Keywords: Algorithmic mediation; Semiotic self; Job seeking; Life projects; Chessboard World

Socioemotional well-being is cast as inner coherence, driven by individual planning and control. This approach fails to grasp students’ experience of chronic liminality, where uncertainty is inherent to development (Turner, 1969). From a cultural–semiotic view, we reconceive well-being as tensegrity of the Self—integrity-in-tension emerging from the capacity to productively sustain tensions between normativities and possibilities (Valsiner, 2002). Enabled by imagination—conceived as co-genetic poiesis (Tateo, 2017) nourished by cultural resources (Zittoun, 2016)—that pleromatizes gaps and re-semiotizes experience, the present is co-determined by shadow trajectories of the not-lived past and by “specters of the future”: artifacts and discourses—e.g., artificial intelligence and social media—that pre-delimit possibilities and impossibilities (Boulanger, 2021). We critically engage self-efficacy and life-design models that, by valorizing linear planning, overlook the adaptive function of fragmentation. Accordingly, well-being is the capacity to inhabit ambiguity, with implications for university policy: shifting from predefined goals to cultivating students’ capacities to live meaningfully within irreversible time (Valsiner, 2014). In this frame, fields of affective semiosis color directionality and value hierarchies, orienting action without fixing endpoints, thus preserving openness. Such a shift reframes institutional care: from scripting futures to scaffolding reflective, culturally mediated meaning-making across transitions amid ongoing uncertainty.

Keywords: Socioemotional well-being; Chronic liminality; Tensegrity of the self; Affective semiosis; Shadow trajectories and future specters

Cooking programs operate as semio-affective modulators that recalibrate meaning and anticipation within life projects and career trajectories. Located at the intersection of the psychology of food and cultural psychology, the analysis proposes the concept of the spect-act to name the recursive coupling between spectating and acting that unfolds in the interval opened by the screen, where the inhibition of immediate action makes possible an affective and semiotic rehearsal of voices, positions, and futures. Memory, reconceived in the constructive tradition (Bartlett, 1932; Wagoner, 2017, 2024), operates as imaginative reconstruction grounded in an affective attitude rather than as the retrieval of inert traces. The Deleuzian virtual (Deleuze, 1968/1994) designates a dimension of the real that insists in the tension between the factual present and unattainable images, reorganizing the present rather than postponing it toward an imagined future. Dialogical analysis (Bakhtin, 1986; Gillespie & Cornish, 2010) renders explicit the heteroglossic texture of the utterance and the perspectival layers through which the viewer is interpellated. Intelligent career theory (Arthur, Claman, & DeFillippi, 1995; Zikic, 2014) links the semio-affective process to the formation of career capital across motivational, social, and dispositional dimensions, while procedural mastery remains the province of deliberate practice that the screen cannot supply. Algorithmic platforms, reality competition formats, and influencer economies make the spect-act visible at work; resistance, audience differentiation, and the prolongation of viewing into everyday decision constitute its open horizon.

Keywords: Spect-act; Virtuality; Life project; Career development; Psychology of food

The tenth commandment, You shall not covet, acquires renewed analytical relevance when approached not simply as a religious prohibition, but as a semiotic-affective device for examining how desire becomes culturally regulated. Contemporary digital ecologies increasingly organize recognition through visibility, comparison, and recommendation, potentially transforming the conditions through which people orient themselves toward others and anticipate possible futures. From a semiotic-cultural perspective, coveting may be understood relationally, as the desired object acquires significance through the self–other relation, becoming not merely something to possess but a sign through which worth and possible ways of being are negotiated (Mead, 1934/1967; Valsiner, 2021). Digital platforms intensify these relational fields, while generative AI introduces further mediation by participating in how people narrate, elaborate, and project possible selves and trajectories. Rather than assuming that such technologies determine desire, this chapter examines how they may reorganize the semiotic conditions within which desire and futurity are constructed. Drawing on semiotic-cultural psychology and approaches to imagination (Zittoun, 2006; Tateo, 2018), it explores a tension between processes through which signs become rigidified around comparative cultural scripts and those through which meaning remains available for reorganization and the emergence of alternatives. The commandment therefore becomes a historical lens for examining a contemporary transformation in which comparison may no longer appear primarily as an individually regulated fault but as an ordinary condition of digital participation. The resulting question concerns how life projects remain open to transformation when the same ecologies through which futures are imagined continuously organize what becomes visible, desirable, and seemingly possible.

Keywords: Semiotic regulation; Desire; Futurity; Digital ecologies; Generative AI