Gabriele Marino: The Semiotics of Internet Memes

Circulating mainly as captioned pictures and videos (but being a form of thought in the first place), memes are featured with vivid synthetic qualities and easiness to be modified and personalized; in this respect their pre-digital phylogeny may include: anonymous art (from Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” to Banksy), political mottos (prototypical catchphrase “Keep calm and carry on”), remix cultures (from Aristophanes to subvertising), vernacular religious iconography (the countless, diatopically diverse representations of the very same saintly figure). On the one hand, memes feature a striking, “whimsical” (Shifman) element, a punctum (Barthes), which is a mistake in a very broad sense (from the broken English of LOLcats to the exaggerated physiognomy of emoticons and rage faces). On the other hand, they feature a template, a modular “serial syntagm” (Geninasca), being “rickety” (Eco). Memes can be created according to three main “radicals” (Frye), which outline both a chronological and syntactic-pragmatic typology (a digital update of Lévi-Strauss’ “bricolage” and Genette’s “hypertextuality”): sharing, remixing, and remaking. There is no such thing as the alleged “formula of virality” whose myth is being elaborated within digital marketing; in fact, virality itself embraces the forms of formulaic communication, wherein each single user may express themselves idiosyncratically: by either letting themselves being “infected” or contrasting broadcasted messages, in order to participate in the flow of online discourse. Proper memes are not merely “viral content”, as they actually do multiply virality to the square: they are not so much the means to spread a given piece of media, nor they talk about it per se; rather, they are the parody of the very Internet fad, addressing our collective obsession for it. The paper will support these theoretical proposals by relying upon case studies drawn among the most popular mainstream Internet memes, such as the “facepalm” and the “Distracted boyfriend”.

Gabriele Marino is assistant professor in semiotics at the University of Turin, Italy, where he teaches Semiotics of music cultures. His scientific interests revolve around music, online communication and theoretical issues in semiotics.