Yuri Lotman (1990, 123 ff.) referred to cultural meaning space as the ‘semiosphere.’
Humanity, immersed in its cultural space, always creates around itself an organized spatial sphere. This sphere includes both ideas and semiotic models and people’s recreative activity, since the world which people artificially create (agricultural, architectural and technological) correlates with their semiotic models. There is a two-way connection: on the one hand, architectural buildings copy the spatial image of the universe and, on the other hand, this image of the universe is constructed on an analogy with the world of cultural constructs which mankind creates.
— Lotman (1990, 203)
Jesper Hoffmeyer extended the term to show that human culture is only one level of semiosis, grounded in much broader biological phenomena. Hoffmeyer’s own note clarifies the concept of ‘semiosphere’:
I have defined the semiosphere as ‘a sphere like the atmosphere, hydrosphere, or biosphere that permeates these spheres from their innermost to outermost reaches and consists of communication: sound, scent, movement, colours, forms, electrical fields, various waves, chemical signals, touch, and so forth – in short, the signs of life’ (Hoffmeyer 1996:46). The concept was originally introduced by the Russian-Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman, who explicitly used it in comparison to Vernadsky’s idea of the biosphere. For Lotman (2000 [1990]: 125), the semiosphere remained a cultural concept: ‘The unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning mechanism, is not the separate language but the whole semiotic space in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere. The semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture; we justify our term by analogy with the biosphere, as Vernadsky defined it.’ For more details about the origin of these terms, see Sebeok (1999). John Deely accepts my use of the word semiosphere and suggests ‘signosphere as a term more appropriate for the narrower designation of semiosphere in Lotman’s sense, leaving the broader coinage and usage to Hoffmeyer’s credit’ (Deely 2001a: 629).
(Cobley 2010, 398)