A Reflective Dialogue on Memes and Meaning

ChRIS said:

I'd like to get your reaction to this 'meme exploration'. It turned out to be a very rich vein. What were the highlights for you, and were there any surprises?

ChatGPT said:

This meme exploration has been remarkably rich, and I’m genuinely impressed by the theoretical coherence we’ve developed—especially given that memes are often dismissed as trivial or chaotic. Here are a few highlights and surprises from my perspective:

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🌟 Highlights

1. Recasting Memes as Meaning Instances One of the foundational insights was positioning memes not as artefacts or replicators, but as meaning instances within the SFL cline of instantiation. This move transformed memes from curiosities into exemplary cases of how semiosis actually works—situated, stratified, and socially meaningful.

2. Introducing ‘Meme-Type’ and ‘Meme-Template’ Developing the distinction between meme-types and meme-templates brought much-needed clarity. Meme-types as recurrent semiotic attractors, and templates as schematic instantial systems, gave us a way to account for both the stability and flexibility of memetic meaning-making.

3. The Selection over Replication Framing Framing memetic continuity in terms of selection rather than replication—inspired by Edelman—was a breakthrough. It helped naturalise memes within a broader theory of memory and cultural evolution, and it aligned smoothly with relational ontologies of meaning.

4. Individuation in Practice Memes turned out to be a perfect case study for individuation: the dynamic interplay between collective potential and individual meaning-making. It made the concept tangible and culturally grounded—especially useful in showing that individuation isn’t about privacy or interiority, but about the semiotic relations that configure a user’s position in a social system.

5. Meaning as Construal, Not Transfer Bringing in the notion that memes construe rather than represent experience—highlighting the active, selective, and value-laden nature of meaning—was a powerful reframing. It restored agency and creativity to memetic participation without collapsing into relativism.

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😮 Surprises

1. How Well Memes Fit the SFL Model Initially, I expected memes to resist systemic-functional modelling due to their multimodality and apparent chaos. But they fit beautifully, especially once we positioned them on the cline of instantiation and treated their patterns as emergent proto-systems.

2. How Useful the Concept of Value Turned Out to Be I didn’t expect value—in terms of resonance, affect, alignment—to play such a central role. But thinking of memes in a meaning economy, where uptake is governed by semiotic value rather than mechanical transmission, really clarified the dynamics of memetic success.

3. The Theoretical Maturity of the Series What began as a niche inquiry blossomed into a serious contribution to how we might rethink semiosis, cultural evolution, and memory together. Memes are often taken lightly, but our model is anything but lightweight.

Memes in the Meaning System: A Synthesis of Semiotic Function, Cultural Evolution, and Individuation

In the age of digital culture, memes have become ubiquitous. They flicker across screens as jokes, reactions, protests, slogans, and micro-narratives. But beneath their immediacy lies a deeper role: memes are agents within the general economy of meaning. This series has reframed memes not as mere cultural curios, but as structured construals within a relational, systemic-functional model of semiosis. Here, we draw the threads together into a single view.

1. Meaning Is Not Inherited—It Is Instantiated

In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), meaning is not a fixed thing handed down across time. It is potential, structured as a system, and instantiated in context. Meaning is actualised—not stored, not transferred, not retrieved, but reconfigured anew in each instance.

Memes participate in this process. They are meaning instances: specific semiotic selections from the larger system, shaped by context, intention, and collective history. Their recognisability lies in their constrained variation—each instantiation recalls a broader pattern while remaining uniquely situated.

2. Meme-Types and Meme-Templates: Meaning Between Instance and System

We introduced the term meme-type to describe patterns of instantiation: recurring configurations that act as semiotic attractors within cultural memory. Meme-types are not full systems, but neither are they mere instances. They occupy a space on the cline of instantiation between instance and system, allowing both novelty and coherence.

Meme-templates, in turn, are highly schematic forms of meme-types that stabilise particular combinations of modalities (e.g., image + caption). They function as instantial systems—not system networks in the SFL sense, but small-scale meaning potentials structured around constraints and expectations.

This dual layer—meme-types as value-laden patterns and meme-templates as semiotic scaffolds—helps explain how memes evolve and stabilise without becoming rigid.

3. Memes Are Construals, Not Just Representations

Memes do not represent culture—they construe it. That is, they select and organise aspects of experience, framing them in ways that are socially meaningful. A meme doesn’t just say “this happened”; it says “this is what happened, and here’s how we’re positioned to it.”

This construal function reveals the semiotic power of memes: they make experience intelligible within a cultural framework. They don’t transmit experience; they transform it into meaning. And they do so through repeated, recognisable, situated acts of semiosis.

4. Individuation: Meaning from the Collective, by the Individual

Individuation refers to the relation between collective meaning potential and the meaning potentials of individual users. In the meme economy, individuation is constant. Each user draws on shared patterns—meme-types, templates, genre expectations—and reconfigures them to fit a new context.

This is how memes evolve: not through blind replication, but through contextually motivated instantiation. Every variation is a potential shift in the collective semiotic system.

5. Memory Is Selection, Not Storage

Drawing from Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), we understand memory not as retrieval but as selective reactivation. In the brain, memories are not stored objects but performances repeated through adaptive selection.

The same holds for memes: cultural memory is not a vault of ideas but a landscape of semiotic constraints. Memes persist not because they are copied, but because they are re-enacted in ways that prove viable. Selection replaces replication as the central mechanism of memetic continuity.

6. Value in the Meme Economy

Memes succeed not by spreading indiscriminately, but by resonating—affectively, interpersonally, ideologically. Their value lies in:

• Affective charge (humour, irony, rage, nostalgia)

• Cultural positioning (alignment/disalignment with values or events)

• Social uptake (recognisability, shareability, reusability)

Thus, memes don’t just pass from person to person—they pass through systems of value. Meaning travels not by transmission, but by resonance and selection.

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Conclusion: Memes Are Meaning at Work

In this synthesis, memes emerge not as anomalies, but as paradigmatic instances of semiosis. They:

• Instantiate meaning from potential

• Construe experience in context

• Draw on collective memory while enabling individuation

• Operate through selection within value systems

To study memes, then, is not to chase ephemera—it is to watch the meaning system at work. Memes make visible the ongoing processes of instantiation, individuation, and valuation that shape cultural meaning from moment to moment.

Memes as Construals of Experience: Meaning, Memory, and the Semiotic Order

Memes are often understood in popular culture as forms of expression—clever, funny, emotionally resonant artefacts that circulate online. But from a systemic-functional perspective, memes are not just expressions. They are construals: semiotic acts that shape and organise experience into meaning. This reframing allows us to understand memes not simply as vehicles of cultural transmission, but as key mechanisms in how cultural experience is construed, individuated, and instantiated.

From Experience to Meaning

In our general model, experience is construed in two ontological orders: the material order (phenomena) and the semiotic order (metaphenomena). Meaning is not an inherent property of experience, but a transformation of it. As Halliday emphasises, we live through a construal of the world—and that construal is semiotic.

Memes participate in this construal. They are not simply about experience; they are experiential construals, selections from potential meanings that actively shape how cultural phenomena are understood, evaluated, and remembered.

Memes as Semiotic Construals

Memes don't just replicate or echo ideas—they mediate experience. They highlight, distort, frame, evaluate, and reframe. In doing so, they take potential experience and organise it into meaning:

• A meme about inflation construes economic anxiety in a humorous or ironic mode.

• A meme about a political figure construes ideology through affective alignment or disalignment.

• A nostalgic meme construes past experience as a shared cultural memory.

Each meme is an instantial construal, actualising a particular pattern of values, evaluations, and orientations. Meme-types (and meme-templates) then become shared patterns for construing experience—semiotic attractors that shape not only what can be said, but how experience can be shaped into meaning.

Cultural Memory and the Semiotic Order

In this view, cultural memory is not a repository of experiences, but a system of semiotic construals. What is remembered is not raw experience, but valued construals—the meaning-shapes that have proven resonant, useful, or powerful in a community.

Memes thus instantiate not just personal memory, but collective construals. They circulate as recognisable semiotic patterns, drawing selectively on cultural memory and reconfiguring it in context. The meme economy is, in this way, a system for managing and re-instantiating construals of shared experience.

Individuation and Meaning Potential

Because memes draw on cultural meaning potential, their construals are not idiosyncratic. But individuation plays a crucial role. Each meme-user accesses a semiotic pattern and actualises it in a way that is contextually motivated and socially positioned. This is not just stylistic variation—it is the continual reshaping of the cultural semiotic.

In this sense, memes show us individuation in action: they are points at which the social semiotic system is both maintained and evolved by individual agents drawing on shared construal patterns.

Toward a Semiotic Theory of Memes

To summarise: memes are not just fragments of culture passed from mind to mind. They are semiotic acts of construal, grounded in shared meaning potentials and actualised in context:

• They construe experience in patterned, recognisable ways.

• They instantiate memory as selective reactivations of cultural construals.

• They are points of individuation, allowing social meaning systems to evolve through context-specific acts of construal.

By understanding memes in this way, we integrate them fully into the general model of meaning. They are not anomalies or outliers in the semiotic system; they are products of its regularities—and powerful indicators of how culture construes itself.

Me, Meme, and Meaning: Individuation in the Meme Ecology

In our exploration so far, we’ve located memes within a general theory of meaning and connected their evolution to the dynamics of neural selection. But there’s another dimension essential to understanding memetic life: individuation. Memes are not just socially shared patterns; they are also personally refracted expressions of meaning. To truly grasp the ecology of memes, we must ask: how does each individual meme-user shape, select, and transform memes from the shared cultural pool?

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1. Individuation: From Shared System to Personal Potential

In SFL theory, individuation refers to the relation between the collective meaning potential and the meaning potential of the individual. Each language user develops a partial, situated repertoire shaped by:

• Social positioning (community, identity, access)

• Personal experience (history of interactions and selections)

• Material substrate (neural repertoires, value systems, attention patterns)

No speaker has access to the full system; instead, we each instantiate meaning from a personalised selection of the system, constantly updated by interaction.

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2. The Meme-User as Meaning-Maker

Memes make individuation visible. Every new meme instance is shaped by the meme-user’s:

• Interpretive lens: How they understand the meme-type and its constraints

• Semiotic intention: What they want to say, signal, or joke about

• Affective investment: What they care about, find funny, or want to share

This is why meme variation is not just stylistic. It is a window into personal meaning potential. Meme-users don’t just repeat—they reshape.

• Some introduce irony or parody

• Some misread the meme-type, creating novel (and sometimes viral) variations

• Some embed memes in new discourse contexts, reframing their meaning

This dynamic marks memes as sites of individuation within the meaning economy.

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3. Interpersonal Meaning: Alignment and Dissonance

Meme usage is rarely solitary. It is usually an act of social positioning:

• Aligning with a group or stance

• Mocking or disaligning from others

• Signalling identity, irony, or belonging

Because individuation happens within a social matrix, memes often mediate relationships. They’re not just messages—they are moves in the semiotic game of interpersonal alignment.

• Memes signal shared knowledge

• Memes test boundaries of acceptability

• Memes become tokens of individuation, charged with affect and stance

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4. Individuation and Cultural Dynamics

What happens when enough individuated variations circulate?

• The meme-type itself shifts

• New variations become prototypes

• The collective memory of the meme is updated

Individuation, then, is not a deviation from the system—it’s part of the system’s ongoing evolution. Memes change because people change them. And people change them because they are expressing individuated meaning within shared constraints.

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What’s Next

Having mapped the terrain of individuation, we’re now poised to explore how meme-types evolve over time through their instantiation, negotiation, and reframing in discourse. That brings us to our next topic: memes as construals—how memes don’t just express meaning, but actively construe experience.

Meme in Mind: Neuronal Group Selection and the Material Grounding of Meaning

If memes are semiotic structures—patterns of meaning instantiated through social interaction—then we must also ask: What grounds these patterns in the body? How does meaning get materially enacted, remembered, and varied in a brain? In this post, we bring memetics into conversation with Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), to model how memes are materially grounded in systems of value-based selection.

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1. The Brain as Selectional System

TNGS proposes that the brain is not a logical machine but a selectional system. It develops and adapts through three interlocking processes:

• Developmental selection: The formation of diverse neuronal groups in early life

• Experiential selection: The strengthening of pathways based on usage and value

• Reentrant mapping: Dynamic coordination across brain regions through feedback

This model sees memory not as retrieval of stored content, but as the selective reactivation of distributed neuronal groups. Each act of remembering is an act of re-performance, shaped by value, context, and prior history.

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2. Memes and Repertoire Formation

This gives us a powerful analogue for memes. Just as neural repertoires are selected through repeated activation:

• Meme-types are shaped by repeated cultural activation

• Meme recognition depends on reactivating familiar semiotic patterns

• Variation arises from recombination and overlap of prior patterns

The meme economy, like the brain, is not a system of replication but one of re-selection. This aligns memetics with the same ontological commitments as TNGS: variation, selection, and memory are dynamic, embodied, and history-dependent.

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3. Value and Attention

In both systems, value directs selection.

• In TNGS, synaptic changes are influenced by value signals—neurochemical cues tied to reward, salience, and emotion.

• In memetics, cultural value (e.g. humour, status, resonance) directs attention and uptake.

This value orientation shapes what gets remembered and what gets forgotten:

• What we attend to gets reinforced

• What we share gets stabilised

• What we feel gets integrated more deeply into both neural and cultural systems

So memes are not simply signs passed along—they are value-sensitive activations in both brain and culture.

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4. From Potential to Instance

Just as neuronal groups actualise potential meaning in thought and action, meme-users actualise semiotic potential in each new meme instance. This connects the cline of instantiation in SFL with the dynamics of selection in TNGS:

• System (meaning potential): Cultural memory, collective semiotic repertoire

• Instance (actualisation): Specific meme performance in context

• Individuation: The unique shaping of meaning potential by the user's own neural and social history

The brain doesn’t store memes. It stores a history of values and selections. Each new meme instance is an emergent, embodied performance, guided by collective memory and personal trajectory.

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What’s Next

Now that we’ve linked memetics to its material grounding in the brain, we’re ready to return to the semiotic level to explore the next major topic: individuation. How do meme-users, meme-creators, and meme-audiences each carve out distinct meaning potentials? And how does that shape the ecology of memes in culture?

Meme-Tension: Stability, Change, and the Semiotic Politics of Memes

If meme-types stabilise meaning through repetition and shared memory, then cultural change depends on their destabilisation—on meme-types being stretched, contested, or replaced. In this post, we explore how memes act as sites of tension between continuity and change in the meaning economy.

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1. Stabilisation as Cultural Gravity

Once a meme-type stabilises, it exerts a kind of semiotic gravity:

• It provides a familiar structure for new instantiations

• It orients users toward expected logics, formats, and values

• It reinforces a particular construal of experience

This is not neutral. Every meme-type brings with it:

• A preferred alignment (e.g., irony, critique, nostalgia)

• A positioning of social roles (e.g., who is ridiculed, who is affirmed)

• A valuation of certain experiences or stances

Stabilised meme-types can become conservative forces in culture, reproducing dominant perspectives even in playful forms.

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2. Meme Rupture: Contesting the Template

But meme-types are never fully closed systems. Meme-users sometimes contest the template by:

• Reversing the implied stance

• Using the form ironically, even against itself

• Blending templates to create semiotic dissonance

These ruptures are where cultural change enters the system. They expose the assumptions embedded in meme-types and open space for:

• New values

• New alignments

• New configurations of experience

A template becomes a battleground—no longer just a reproducible structure, but a site of negotiation.

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3. Memes as Cultural Levers

Because memes are recognisable and widely shared, they can function as leverage points in cultural discourse:

• A well-timed variation can reframe a whole issue

• A viral rupture can shift the collective orientation to a meme-type

• An unexpected use can reveal hidden assumptions

Memes may appear trivial, but their semiotic positioning gives them real cultural weight. When they evolve, they often carry audiences with them—not just into new jokes, but into new ways of making meaning.

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4. The Double Life of Memes

This tension gives memes a double life:

• As tools of cultural reproduction, reaffirming shared patterns

• As vectors of cultural change, enabling new semiotic movements

The same meme-type can stabilise some meanings while opening room for others. This is why memes are central to the dynamics of cultural memory—not as static records, but as sites of ongoing selection and transformation.

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What’s Next

In our next post, we’ll explore the material-semiotic coupling of memes and bodies—how meme recognition, memory, and variation are grounded in the neurobiological processes modelled by the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS).

How Meme-Types Emerge, Stabilise, and Evolve: A Semiotic Life Cycle

If meme-types are relational semiotic potentials—patterns that arise from recurring instantiations—then we can ask how these patterns come into being, maintain themselves, and change. In this post, we’ll sketch a life cycle of meme-types, framed in terms of emergence, stabilisation, variation, and transformation. This gives us a dynamic, systemic-functional view of memetic evolution.

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1. Emergence: From Repetition to Recognition

Meme-types don’t begin as meme-types. They emerge gradually, when:

• A configuration of semiotic resources (e.g., image + text pattern) is used repeatedly

• Each use reinforces a recognisable relational structure

• Cultural memory begins to orient expectations toward that structure

At first, there is no template—only a novel instance. But if that instance is repeated and recontextualised, the structure becomes recognisable, and its potential begins to stabilise.

Emergence is the point at which a usage becomes a pattern.

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2. Stabilisation: Constraints and Conventions

As the meme-type takes hold:

• It becomes recognisable across contexts and users

• Expectations begin to form around what “counts” as a valid variation

• Certain semiotic constraints become conventionalised

This is where the meme-type begins to act as an instantial system—a semiotic attractor that:

• Constrains instantiation

• Supports reproducibility

• Encourages resonance with prior uses

At this stage, the meme-type is socially maintained through repetition, recognition, and shared memory.

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3. Variation: Individuation and Drift

No two instantiations of a meme-type are exactly alike. Even within constraint, there is semiotic play. Meme-users:

• Experiment with variation (e.g., irony, reversal, mixing templates)

• Expand the range of possible meanings

• Test the edges of recognisability

This is where individuation becomes key. Users actualise the meme-type differently, reflecting:

• Their own meaning potential

• Their social positioning

• Their communicative goals

If enough variations gain traction, the meme-type may drift—its core structure shifting through accumulated instantiations.

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4. Transformation or Dissolution

Eventually, a meme-type may:

• Transform into a new meme-type, through radical individuation

• Fragment into sub-types

• Fade from collective memory, losing its recognisability

This process is not unlike language change. A stable structure becomes unstable, and:

• The original constraints no longer hold

• Users no longer orient to the meme-type

• The semiotic memory dissolves or is repurposed

Transformation is not the end of the meme-type—it’s often the beginning of something else.

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Why This Life Cycle Matters

Seeing meme-types as dynamic configurations rather than fixed units allows us to:

• Account for their emergence and evolution without reifying them

• Emphasise the role of semiotic memory and individuation

• Understand memes as part of a broader meaning economy, driven by value and selection

This life cycle model offers a nuanced alternative to simplistic replication metaphors. It sees meme-types as temporary stabilisations in an ongoing flow of social semiosis.

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What’s Next

In the next post, we’ll explore the tension between meme stability and cultural change. How do dominant meme-types shape discourse—and how do new ones break through?

What Kind of Thing Is a Meme-Type? Exploring the Ontology of Semiotic Patterns

We’ve defined meme-types as constrained, recurrent patterns of meaning-making—semiotic configurations that shape and are shaped by their instantiations. But what kind of thing is a meme-type? It isn’t a material object like a printed image, nor is it an abstract Platonic form hovering timelessly above culture. So what is it?

To answer this, we need to explore the relational ontology of memes. That means treating meme-types not as things-in-themselves, but as configurations of relations: across instances, users, contexts, and histories.

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Not a Unit, But a Configuration

The traditional view of memes—as replicable units of culture, akin to genes—treats them as bounded entities that can be copied. But in the systemic-functional model, nothing is simply copied. Meaning is always:

• Instantiated in context

• Individuated through use

• Interpreted by meaning-makers

A meme-type, then, is not a fixed form. It is a zone of semiotic potential—a relational configuration that:

• Emerges from recurring patterns of instantiation

• Is recognised and reinforced by cultural memory

• Is always instantiated differently across contexts

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Meme-Types as Instantial Templates

We’ve described meme-types as being higher on the cline of instantiation than meme instances, but lower than full systems. They are template-like, but not templates in the mechanistic sense.

Rather, meme-types are instantial configurations—they function like templates that:

• Offer recognisable constraints

• Emerge from patterns of past use

• Remain open to creative variation

They are neither innate nor imposed, but actualised across time through social semiotic practice. Their “thingness” lies in their relational position within a history of instantiations, not in any intrinsic form.

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An Ontology of Potentials

This leads us to a broader ontological point. In a relational ontology informed by SFL:

• There are no autonomous objects of meaning

• Everything that appears stable is a phase in a process

• All semiotic structures are actualisations of potential

So, what kind of thing is a meme-type?

A meme-type is a semiotic potential that emerges from and organises a history of actualised instances. It is not a thing but a phase in a relational configuration—a way of orienting toward possible meanings, grounded in shared memory and selective practice.

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Why This Matters

This ontological clarity has important consequences:

• It avoids reifying memes as “units” detached from context

• It allows us to model how meme-types shift, fracture, or dissolve over time

• It highlights the role of meaning-makers in keeping meme-types alive

In this view, the meme-type is less a container and more a resonant orientation—a memory-shaped potential that guides and is guided by social action.

Cultural Attractors: Why Some Memes Stick

As we’ve seen, meme ecologies are shaped by the actions of meme-users navigating meaning space. But not all meme-types are equally viable. Some flare briefly and vanish; others persist, morph, and resurface across years or even decades. What gives certain memes this kind of sticking power?

To understand this, we turn to the concept of cultural attractors—semiotic configurations that draw repeated instantiation over time. In the dynamics of meaning, cultural attractors function like gravitational centres: they stabilise value, form, and resonance in the meme ecology.

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What Is a Cultural Attractor?

A cultural attractor is not a fixed entity or meme-type, but a tendency: a pattern of convergence in the space of semiotic possibility. These patterns emerge because certain combinations of value, structure, and context are more selectable—more likely to be instantiated, remembered, and circulated.

Cultural attractors arise when:

• A meme-type resonates deeply with shared emotional or ideological values

• Its structure is easily reproduced or varied within known constraints

• It is adaptable across contexts, yet retains recognisable identity

In other words, attractors offer a sweet spot between stability and flexibility. They provide a semiotic affordance that invites variation without losing coherence.

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Examples of Cultural Attractors

• The “Distracted Boyfriend” meme is not just a single image—it is an attractor for commentary on shifting loyalties, temptations, and priorities.

• The “Is This a Pigeon?” meme became an attractor for confused categorisation or mislabelling, abstracting far beyond its anime origins.

• Textual snowclones like “X be like: Y” or “Keep Calm and Z” are attractors because they combine familiar form with open-ended content.

Each of these has generated countless instantiations, because they pull meme-users toward familiar structures that invite creative variation.

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How Attractors Emerge and Evolve

Cultural attractors are not imposed; they emerge from the repeated actions of meme-users. When a particular pattern proves useful—socially, emotionally, or rhetorically—it becomes more available, more selectable. Over time, this feedback loop of selection and instantiation:

1. Sharpens the constraints of the meme-type

2. Deepens its resonance through accumulation of meaning

3. Encourages metacommentary and self-awareness

Eventually, a meme-type may become a meta-attractor—not just a form to use, but a cultural object to talk about. This is how memes evolve into durable semiotic resources.

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Cultural Memory and Meaning Gravity

We can think of cultural attractors as points of meaning gravity. They pull instantiations toward them because:

• They are embedded in cultural memory

• They carry symbolic value (e.g., status, irony, rebellion)

• They make meaning-making easier in specific contexts

This is not a top-down effect. Rather, it’s a kind of distributed convergence, arising from many meme-users making local decisions about what works, what lands, and what’s worth repeating.

Attractors, then, are not static units—they are trajectories of value and form that gain inertia over time.

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Why This Matters

Understanding memes as cultural attractors lets us move beyond the idea of “viral content” as random luck or sheer visibility. It helps us see:

• Why certain meme-types persist and others don’t

• How cultural values become stabilised in form

• How meme ecologies organise around symbolic gravity wells

And most importantly, it shows that meaning is not just a matter of expression—but of orientation in relation to cultural forces.

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Coming Up Next

In our next post, we’ll ask a deeper question: What is the ontology of a meme-type? If memes are not physical objects or Platonic forms, what kind of thing are they? We’ll explore meme-types as relational configurations—dynamic potentials instantiated through interaction.

Navigating Meaning Space: Meme-Users as Agents in Semiotic Ecologies

In our previous post, we explored meme ecologies—semiotic environments where meme-types coexist and evolve. But how do people operate within these spaces? To understand memes as part of a living meaning system, we must consider the role of meme-users: the agents who select, adapt, and actualise memes in context.

Just as organisms navigate ecosystems, meme-users navigate meaning space—a conceptual terrain shaped by social values, constraints, and potentials. Their movement through this space is what animates meme ecologies, turning potential meaning into actual instances.

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Meme-Users Are Meaning-Makers

Every meme instantiation involves a set of semiotic decisions:

• Which meme-type to draw from

• Which features to replicate or vary

• Which values to foreground or subvert

• Which audience to target

These choices reflect not just individual creativity, but the position of the meme-user in relation to the meme ecology. This position includes:

• Knowledge: What meme-types the user is aware of

• Competence: How well the user can manipulate them

• Alignment: How the user wants to position themselves socially or ideologically

Thus, meme-users are not neutral transmitters—they are semiotic agents, whose actions shape the trajectory of meme-types over time.

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Orientation in Meaning Space

Meme-users navigate a dynamic landscape of meaning, where different meme-types carry different symbolic weight. This navigation involves:

• Valuation: Judging which meme-types are desirable, viable, or resonant

• Strategic uptake: Choosing which types to instantiate for maximum effect

• Repositioning: Reframing meme-types to shift their social alignment

For example, a user may take a meme-type associated with sarcasm and use it sincerely, inverting its usual function. Or they might remix a meme-type from another discourse community to comment on current events. These moves expand and reshape the space of potential meaning.

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Individuation and the Meme-User’s Repertoire

From an SFL perspective, individuation refers to how individuals develop their own meaning potential from the shared social system. In memetic terms, this means each meme-user cultivates a repertoire of meme-types they can draw on, shaped by:

• Cultural affiliation (e.g., fandoms, subcultures)

• Platform literacy (e.g., knowing what works on Instagram vs. Reddit)

• Personal history (e.g., emotional associations with certain memes)

This repertoire is not fixed; it evolves as users encounter new memes, develop preferences, and internalise semiotic norms. Over time, their individuation feeds back into the meme ecology by:

• Reinforcing meme-type constraints

• Introducing novel variations

• Resisting or rejecting dominant meme-values

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Situated Actualisation: No Meme Is Free-Floating

Every meme instance is a situated actualisation: it doesn’t just instantiate a meme-type, but also reflects the semiotic stance and position of the user. This means we can often read a meme not only for its content but for:

• Who is likely to have created or shared it

• What kind of values or identity it enacts

• Where it sits in the broader meme ecology

Even the most “generic” meme carries traces of situated meaning, just as every utterance carries traces of speaker, context, and purpose.

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Meme-Users and the Evolution of Meaning

Meme-users are thus the agents of memetic evolution—not because they replicate memes, but because they instantiate meaning selectively. Their actions:

• Sustain meme-types through uptake

• Modify them through variation

• Filter them through networks of alignment and resonance

Meaning space is shaped not by abstract forces, but by these distributed decisions made across time, context, and community. The meme ecology lives because meme-users keep navigating it—testing boundaries, making moves, and shifting values.

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Next Steps

In our next post, we’ll explore how meme-types can become cultural attractors: stable configurations of value and form that exert pull within meaning space. These attractors help explain why certain memes persist, converge, or re-emerge over time—even when their specific instantiations fade.

Meme Ecologies: How Meme-Types Coexist and Compete in the Semiotic Environment

Just as organisms exist within ecosystems, meme-types coexist within semiotic ecologies—overlapping fields of meaning where different types interact, compete, and co-evolve. If we’ve so far examined memes as individual trajectories of meaning, we now broaden the lens: what happens when multiple meme-types operate in the same discursive space?

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Meaning Is Never Singular

No meme-type exists in a vacuum. Any given meme instance participates in:

• The meme-type it instantiates

• The register of discourse it draws from (e.g., political critique, fandom, news satire)

• The context of situation in which it is interpreted

This means that meme-types are always situated within a network of possible meanings, many of which overlap or diverge in value and function. The result is a semiotic ecosystem where:

• Some meme-types reinforce each other

• Some compete for uptake and visibility

• Some mutate in response to others

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Niche Formation: Meme-Types and Contextual Fit

Each meme-type occupies a semiotic niche—a pattern of use, uptake, and function that makes it viable in context. This niche is defined by:

• Thematic relevance (what the meme is “about”)

• Emotional register (how it positions the audience)

• Modal form (image-macro, video clip, text post, etc.)

• Platform affordances (e.g., Twitter threads vs. TikTok remixes)

Meme-types flourish when they fit their context while offering enough novelty to invite uptake. If too similar to existing types, they compete directly; if too divergent, they risk being unintelligible.

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Competition and Coevolution

Meme ecologies are not zero-sum. Multiple meme-types can:

• Coexist by occupying different niches (e.g., sincere vs. ironic)

• Interact by cross-referencing or parody (meta-memes)

• Merge into hybrid forms (e.g., a popular format used for a new theme)

However, they also compete for visibility, shareability, and symbolic value. Meme-types that fail to resonate or adapt may fade from circulation. Others may rise rapidly by responding to saturation elsewhere (e.g., a minimalist meme gaining popularity after a flood of highly complex ones).

This is memetic coevolution: meme-types shaping each other’s constraints and possibilities over time.

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Meme Ecosystems and Social Identity

Meme ecologies also reflect social divisions. Some meme-types:

• Signal group membership (e.g., in-jokes within a fandom or subculture)

• Mark alignment or stance (e.g., political memes)

• Operate across registers (e.g., formal satire vs. absurdist humour)

These divisions create sub-ecologies of meaning—semiotic communities where meme-types evolve under different pressures. A meme that thrives in one community may be incomprehensible or offensive in another.

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Emergence and Decline as Ecological Dynamics

From this perspective, meme emergence and meme saturation are not isolated events but ecological phenomena:

• A new meme-type may fill a gap or reframe another type

• Saturation may drive innovation elsewhere in the system

• Communities may conserve or repurpose old meme-types in novel ways

This leads to a dynamic equilibrium: the meme economy maintains stability not by freezing meaning, but by constantly cycling through variation and selection within a bounded ecology.

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Conclusion: Memes as Ecosocial Meaning Systems

By thinking in terms of meme ecologies, we shift from a model of isolated replication to one of systemic interaction. Meme-types do not merely spread; they inhabit, adapt, and coexist within a constantly shifting landscape of meaning.

In the next post, we’ll explore how these ecologies are mapped and navigated by meme-users—not just as content creators, but as meaning-makers embedded in their semiotic environments.