A STRUCTURAL SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF SUNDANESE ASIHAN MANTRAS: CONSTRUCTING CIRCULAR EMPATHY ECOLOGY FOR DIGITAL WELL-BEING AND SDG 3

Abstract

The vast development of digital technology has brought new form of psychological challenge;  algorithmic anxiety, which is as a complex syndrome marked by emotional fatigue and identity erosion originating from relentless data-driven metric validation. This phenomenon challenges the United Nation Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) in achieving digital well-being for digital citizens. While current digital literacy interventions mostly rely on individualistic Western clinical paradigms, this study adopts a “two-eyed seeing” model, which harmonize Barthesian structural semiotics with Sundanese Ethnopsychology. Analyzing a purposively selected corpus of 15 Sundanese Asihan mantras (N=15, drawn from a master archive of 30 documented texts, this study investigates how “ontological security” is linguistically engineered. The findings reveal that Asihan texts systematically employ nominal clause structures to create “nominal stability”, functioning as static semic anchor that protects individual from the volatile changes of external digital metrics. This linguistic architecture is rooted in the Sundanese Ideology of Three (Tritangtu), a cosmic harmony unifiying Earth, Humanity, and Heaven, which redefines individual as a relational entity rather than an isolated subject. Based on these results, this study proposes “Circular Empathy Ecology” framework, a social innovation designed to humanize digital spaces through three pillars: (1) Anticipatory Empathy to filter digital action preemptively; (2) Internalized Validation to decouple self-worth from quantitative metrics; and (3) Community Resilience to shift the burden of well-being from isolated user to the collective digital system. This study provides a culturally grounded ethical framework that operationalizes indigenous oral traditions to advance global digital well-being and sustainability targets.