I argue that a recently observed semiotic turn in linguistics and translation studies confirms the prognosis of media theory that human societies of the electronic age resemble tribal, oral societies more than modern societies, shaped by the print medium. In addition to media theory, semiotics can explain this on account of the similarity between modelling processes in digitalised societies and the human natural environment. As such, surprisingly, while the digital adds new layers to mediating social representations, an ecological shift becomes opportune. Digitalisation (shift from print to digital media) has complex but little-explored consequences for how humans model their environment and society. It presents both challenges and opportunities. Modern philosophy, framed by its corresponding media, has not equipped society with a literacy for interpretative contexts where a multitude of sensory channels, meaning modalities and media overlap. My argument is that while the linearity of modern media formed a correspondingly linearity of human modelling systems, the multimodal turn of digitalisation offers the opportunity for an ecological turn. Linear modelling systems are unfit for digital societies and, we can now explain in hindsight, for the natural environment too. Unlike linear and analytic modern texts, the subjective environment of the human species is multimodally constructed. Linear representations of the print technology underpin mind-body dualist, modern philosophy that appears un-ecological. It distorts the human multimodal cognitive model of the environment into a linear and monomodal one. Developing a joint understanding of ecological and digital literacy would help to solve the various ecological and social problems emerging from the epistemological skepticism of (late) modernity. The shift towards the digital is, essentially, a phenomenon of translation. Particularly, it is a transduction of texts, in their multimodal and intertexual complexities, from their previous media onto digital ones. To develop an understanding of the modelling competencies that would underpin a digitally literate society, meaning articulation in a digital society has to be analysed in comparison to meaning articulation in pre-digital societies. I propose rooting such analysis in a semiotic framework for cultural analysis and ecology. Ecosemiotics is precisely such a theory, concerned with the relations of meaning between humans and their environments. I consider that ecosemiotics is particularly insightful, given this theory’s premise and focus on how representation impacts on the represented.