Abstract

The first part of the article recalls the two main themes of Paolo Fabbri’s well-known 1973 essay: the move towards the semiotic study of mass communication, and the groundbreaking rehabilitation of the Addressee. The second part concentrates on the way in which Umberto Eco used Fabbri’s essay, and in particular the ideas about the receptive aspects of mass communication. The third section looks at the sociosemiotics that developed especially in Italy and France in the 1990s and the early 2000s, highlighting the continuities between these studies and the perspectives opened by Paolo Fabbri.