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.

Emergence in the Meme Economy: Where New Meme-Types Come From

If memetic saturation marks the fading of a meme-type’s semiotic power, emergence is its counterpart: the appearance of new forms that feel fresh, resonant, and meaningful. But new memes don’t just appear—they emerge from the dynamic interaction of system, instance, and social memory. In this post, we ask: how do new meme-types arise within a general model of meaning?

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Not Spontaneous, but Selective

A new meme-type isn’t a spark of creation ex nihilo. It’s the reorganisation of available semiotic material under new constraints. Memes emerge from:

• Recontextualisation: an existing form is placed in a new setting (e.g., a famous painting becomes a reaction meme)

• Recombination: elements from multiple meme-types or discourses are blended

• Reframing: a minor variation shifts the interpretive logic of an existing meme

• Redundancy breakdown: an ironic or parodic instance opens a new trajectory of meaning

Each of these processes reflects selective activation within the semiotic system—guided not by novelty alone, but by value.

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The Role of Value in Emergence

A meme-type only emerges when a form means in a way that is recognisable and desirable within a context. This gives rise to semiotic potential energy—the readiness of a form to be instantiated:

• It aligns with a current social mood or event

• It offers expressive affordances that previous forms do not

• It negotiates tensions or contradictions in existing meanings

This means that new meme-types are not “random mutations.” They are value-driven innovations, shaped by the forces of individuation and cultural selection.

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Emergence Is Also Remembering Differently

Because meaning is memory-dependent, emergence is partly a matter of re-seeing the past. A dormant template or phrase can become memetic simply by being reactivated in the right context. Think of how:

• An old movie clip becomes a new reaction meme

• A vintage ad resurfaces as an ironic commentary

• A forgotten phrase is reframed as political critique

This is diachronic individuation: the re-entry of past meaning potential into present meaning selection.

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System Pressure and Creative Constraint

From an SFL-informed view, emergence is most likely when:

• The existing system is under pressure (e.g., cultural saturation, political urgency)

• The current meaning potential fails to capture a collective feeling

• A previously peripheral pattern becomes salient

This is where constraint becomes creative: the limits of previous forms provide the framing conditions for new types to appear.

The creative meme-user is not starting from scratch—they are navigating a system of tensions, negotiating value through semiotic play.

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Proto-System to Meme-Type

At first, an emerging meme may seem idiosyncratic or unstable. But if it resonates, it stabilises. It becomes a recognisable meme-type—a constrained, shareable field of meaning potential.

The process follows this trajectory:

1. Novel instance: A meaning act that breaks or bends prior constraints

2. Recognition: Uptake by others who see its value

3. Repetition with variation: A pattern begins to form

4. Stabilisation: A meme-type coheres

5. Saturation (eventually): The cycle begins again

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Conclusion: A Living System of Meaning

Memes do not exist in isolation. They emerge, live, and fade within a living system of meaning—a space where value is negotiated, memory is collective, and constraints are creative. The appearance of a new meme-type is not an anomaly; it’s the sign that the meaning system is alive and responding.

In the next post, we’ll explore the ecology of meme-types: how multiple types coexist, compete, or co-evolve across social contexts.

Memetic Saturation: When Meaning Wears Out

In our previous posts, we’ve explored memes as symbolic technologies that extend cultural memory and act as constrained semiotic potentials—meme-types—that are selectively instantiated in social contexts. But even the most resonant meme-types eventually fade. Their power weakens, their appeal declines, and their value dissipates. What happens, semiotically, when a meme is “overused”? How can a model of meaning explain memetic burnout?

Let’s consider how memetic saturation fits into the meaning economy.

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Saturation as Semiotic Exhaustion

A meme-type reaches saturation when its meaning potential is exhausted—when the space of viable instantiations becomes so overpopulated that further instances no longer feel meaningful. This is not just a matter of repetition. It’s a matter of reducing value through over-instantiation.

From an SFL-informed view:

• A meme-type offers a constrained field of meaning potential

• Each instantiation narrows that field by reinforcing expectations

• As instantiations accumulate, the range of variation diminishes

• Eventually, new instances feel derivative, predictable, or hollow

Saturation happens when the relation between meme-type and meme-instance becomes overdetermined—when too many previous instances crowd out the space for individuation.

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Value Collapse and Memetic Death

Memes persist as long as they maintain symbolic value. This value may be ideological, affiliative, affective, or ironic. But in saturated meme-types, the value begins to collapse:

• Recognition becomes cliché

• Alignment feels forced

• Emotional charge dissipates

• Intertextual play loses its surprise

What was once selection becomes inertia. The meme is repeated not because it means, but because it used to mean.

This is the memetic equivalent of semantic bleaching—the erosion of functional meaning due to overuse. At this point, the meme-type may:

• Be abandoned entirely

• Be parodied in a meta-memetic fashion

• Be recharged through ironic inversion

• Be remixed into a new meme-type

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Memetic Entropy and the Pressure for Innovation

Saturation creates semiotic entropy—a condition in which the difference between instances no longer makes a difference. The meme-type ceases to function as a meaningful attractor.

But this breakdown also generates a pressure for innovation. When a meme-type loses semiotic traction, the search for new types intensifies:

• New templates emerge to express similar values in novel forms

• Dormant meme-types may be reactivated with fresh contextual relevance

• Burned-out types may be revived through recombination

In this way, saturation is not just the end of a meme-type’s life—it is the semiotic compost from which new meme-types can grow.

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Memetic Evolution Is Selective, Not Linear

Crucially, saturation reminds us that memetic evolution is not linear. Memes do not become more “fit” over time in any teleological sense. Instead, they become more or less selectable depending on:

• Contextual salience

• Cultural mood

• Media ecology

• Value resonance

What is selectable today may be discarded tomorrow. What was exhausted last year may return with unexpected force. Memes are always context-bound meaning events—not self-contained replicators.

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Looking Ahead

Memetic saturation shows us that meaning has limits—not because the system fails, but because it functions too well. When a meme-type overperforms its function, it burns through its semiotic value. But this burnout, in turn, feeds the creative cycle of individuation and system change.

In the next post, we’ll explore how new meme-types emerge: not from nowhere, but from the shifting interplay of memory, value, and individuation in the meaning economy.

Symbolic Technologies: How Memes Extend Cultural Memory

In earlier posts, we developed a general model of meaning informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and used it to reposition memes as meaning instances drawn from constrained semiotic potentials we’ve called meme-types. These meme-types, we argued, are culturally shared, structurally constrained patterns of meaning-making that evolve through selective instantiation. But if meme-types are the semiotic attractors, and memes the actualised expressions of them, then what enables their persistence and transformation over time?

To answer this, we must see memes not simply as instances of meaning, but as symbolic technologies—semiotic tools that cultures use to extend and manage collective memory.

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Semiotic Technologies and Collective Cognition

A symbolic technology is a tool for extending cognition and memory beyond the individual. Language itself is the most basic example: a symbolic system that allows meanings to be stored, exchanged, and recombined socially. But symbolic technologies also include writing systems, diagrams, formulae, rituals, genre conventions—and memes.

Each of these technologies mediates between individual memory and collective memory, offering ways to externalise, stabilise, and selectively transmit meaning over time.

Memes, in this view, are micro-technologies of cultural memory. They provide compact, resonant formats for:

• Encoding value-laden meaning

• Triggering recognition and emotional response

• Re-activating shared memory traces

• Circulating across networks of social affiliation

Memes don’t store memories in themselves, but they constrain the activation of memory, shaping what is remembered, how it is framed, and for whom it is salient.

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Memory as Selection, Not Storage

As we’ve noted before, Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) reframes memory not as storage and retrieval, but as selective reactivation of dynamic patterns. From this perspective, remembering is not recovering a file, but selectively reproducing a pattern of activity that proved adaptive in prior contexts.

The same principle holds for cultural memory. What persists in culture is not stored content, but patterns of meaning-use that remain selectable—usable, recognisable, re-instantiable—in current contexts.

Memes are thus selectable meaning artefacts. They:

• Arise from culturally individuated values

• Persist through ongoing selection across situations

• Act as cues for the reactivation of shared knowledge

• Enable communities to coordinate experience over time

The value of a meme is not measured in replication counts alone, but in its fitness within semiotic ecosystems—its resonance, recognisability, and re-instantiability across different meaning contexts.

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Memes and the Value Economy

Because memes are semiotic technologies, their survival is governed not by mechanical replication but by symbolic value. They must be worth selecting, which means they must align with the value systems of the communities in which they circulate.

These values may include:

• Ideological alignment: memes that affirm group identity

• Interpersonal resonance: memes that invite humour, empathy, irony

• Contextual relevance: memes that match current events or discourses

• Intertextual echo: memes that rework known patterns recognisably

Every meme that spreads has passed a test—not of accuracy or originality, but of semiotic viability in a value-laden cultural field. What is remembered is not the meme itself, but the relevance structure it evokes and reanimates.

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Symbolic Tools for Meaning Futures

Understanding memes as symbolic technologies helps us see them not just as fragments of entertainment or ideological noise, but as tools for managing shared futures. They compress, circulate, and reframe values, often in ways that feel spontaneous but are shaped by deep semiotic histories.

In this role, memes:

• Extend the reach of collective memory into fast-changing media ecologies

• Structure individuation, enabling individuals to position themselves in relation to shared meaning systems

• Mediate between system and instance, acting as staging grounds for innovation and revaluation

Far from being ephemeral, memes are part of the semiotic infrastructure that allows cultures to remember, forget, adapt, and evolve.

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Looking Ahead

If memes are symbolic technologies for extending memory, then memetic culture is a dynamic site of value negotiation, collective individuation, and semiotic reproduction. In future posts, we’ll explore how this framework helps us understand:

• The logic of memetic saturation and burnout

• The emergence of new meme-types

• The limits of memetic individuation

For now, we’ve taken another step in building a systemic-functional theory of memes—not as things we share, but as ways of sharing meaning across memory, value, and time.

Instantiating the Self: Memes, Individuation, and the Semiotic Construction of Identity

Now that we’ve situated memes within a general theory of meaning—as constrained selections from collective potential—and explored how meme-types stabilise as semiotic attractors, we’re ready to explore how memes participate in a more personal process: the individuation of the self.

From an SFL-informed perspective, individuation refers to the relation between the collective meaning potential and the meaning potential of individual meaners. This isn’t just about what meanings are available—it’s about how each person develops their own semiotic repertoire by selectively appropriating, adapting, and actualising from the shared symbolic environment.

In this view, memes are a key site of individuation: they are where users actively position themselves within the symbolic economy.

Memes as Resources for Identity Work

When we make a meme—or share, remix, or reinterpret one—we aren’t just reproducing a cultural pattern. We’re doing identity work. Each meme instance says something about:

• What we find funny, troubling, or valuable.

• How we position ourselves in relation to others.

• Which discourses we align with or resist.

Memes are thus tools of semiotic affiliation. They let us claim belonging, signal stance, or perform distance. And because meme-types are attractors that already carry social valence, selecting one is also selecting a position within a field of values.

The Dialectic of Constraint and Creativity

Individuation is never free play. The meme-type constrains what counts as a legitimate instance. But the user’s selection and variation assert a point of view, a sensibility, a stance. Individuation is therefore a dialectic between system and instance—between the shared constraints of the meme-type and the creative particularity of the meme-user.

This is clearest in cases where memes are:

• Recontextualised (used in a different cultural or political frame).

• Subverted (reworked to critique the meme-type itself).

• Personalised (brought into relation with one’s biography or situation).

Each act of variation redefines the boundary of the type, shifting what future instantiations might mean.

Memes as Markers of Semiotic Capital

In social contexts, especially online, memes also function as a kind of semiotic capital—a resource through which individuals accrue symbolic value. This value isn’t inherent in the meme itself, but in how fluently and creatively a user navigates the field of meme-types.

Fluency in memetic culture:

• Demonstrates alignment with cultural groups.

• Signals expertise in the implicit rules of variation.

• Offers social legitimacy in networks where symbolic play is valued.

Thus, memes are a site where individuation becomes visible—where people perform their semiotic competence in ways that are recognised, rewarded, or resisted by others.

Conclusion: Meme-Use as Semiotic Self-Making

If meme-types are attractors in the symbolic landscape, then meme-users are travellers through that terrain—selecting, varying, and actualising paths that reflect and construct their position in social space.

Memes, in this light, are not trivial. They are semiotic interfaces where collective memory meets individual agency. They are how people construct identities in relation to the values and constraints of their culture.

This is individuation not as isolation, but as relation: becoming a self through the appropriation of shared meaning.

Semiotic Attractors: How Meme-Types Stabilise Meaning in the Symbolic Economy

In our ongoing effort to integrate memes into a general theory of meaning, we’ve proposed that memes should not be understood primarily as replicators, but as semiotic selections—symbolic acts actualised from constrained meaning potentials. We’ve argued that meme-types, situated between individual instances and the full cultural system, act as proto-systems of meaning that coordinate shared memory and symbolic value.

But this raises a deeper question: why do some meme-types endure and spread while others fade? What gives certain configurations of meaning a gravitational pull on collective attention?

This post introduces the concept of semiotic attractors: meme-types that achieve relative stability and recognisability across time and context, exerting selection pressure within the symbolic economy. These attractors help explain the evolution of cultural meaning not in terms of mechanical replication, but in terms of systemically organised patterns of expectation, value, and memory.

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From Variability to Convergence

Every meme instance is an act of individuation—an actualised meaning that draws from shared meaning potential. But over time, repeated selections tend to converge on preferred forms. Meme-types that are especially resonant—culturally salient, emotionally charged, structurally efficient—become convergent attractors in the symbolic system.

This convergence is not enforced from above but emerges from below, through collective behaviour. Meme-types that are easier to remember, adapt, and interpret gain symbolic momentum. Over time, they begin to define the constraints of the meme-type itself, retroactively shaping what “counts” as a valid or recognisable instance.

Such attractors are semiotic, not statistical. Their stability depends not just on frequency of use, but on their function in the system of meaning:

• They structure expectations within a discourse community.

• They encode implicit values, stances, or ideological positions.

• They become shorthand for complex cultural positions.

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Attractors and the Symbolic Economy

In our earlier model, we framed meme selection in terms of symbolic value: memes succeed not by raw replication, but by negotiating values like status, identification, or emotional resonance. Semiotic attractors are the symbolic analogues of ecological niches—they stabilise around cultural affordances that offer communicative payoffs.

For example:

• "Distracted Boyfriend" stabilised around gender and relationship commentary.

• "Two Buttons" emerged as a frame for moral ambiguity or indecision.

• "Woman Yelling at a Cat" consolidated around emotional excess and contrast.

These meme-types attract new instantiations that reinforce their semiotic centre while also permitting variation. Their persistence lies in their ability to accommodate difference while maintaining identity—a balancing act made possible by their status as constrained systems of meaning.

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Cultural Memory and Path Dependency

Just as Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection proposes that biological memory arises from the reactivation of previously successful neural circuits, cultural memory privileges meme-types that have already proven communicatively effective.

This introduces path dependency into memetic evolution. The more a meme-type is instantiated, the more it becomes:

• Available in memory.

• Expected in discourse.

• Embedded in practices of interpretation.

Meme-types thus create semiotic inertia: new instances are evaluated not only on their novelty or creativity, but also on their recognisability and alignment with prior forms. Attractors act as memory traces—not fixed templates, but gravitational centres that orient symbolic production.

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Semiotic Landscapes and Meaning Ecology

If we zoom out, we can imagine culture as a semiotic landscape—a meaning ecology in which meme-types compete, cooperate, and evolve. Within this landscape:

• Some meme-types dominate particular niches of meaning.

• Others form overlapping attractor basins, interacting across discourses.

• Still others decay as cultural relevance wanes.

This metaphor allows us to model meaning evolution not as linear inheritance, but as dynamic equilibrium. Meme-types rise or fall depending on their fit within shifting fields of value, identity, and cultural memory.

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Conclusion: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Meaning

By understanding meme-types as semiotic attractors, we move beyond static taxonomies or replication metaphors. We begin to see memes not just as the byproducts of culture, but as active participants in the structuring of shared meaning.

This also reinforces our larger theoretical project: that meaning is not a substance passed from mind to mind, but a semiotic system that emerges from the interplay of memory, value, and selection. Meme-types become the attractor basins of this process—converging fields of symbolic energy that organise, constrain, and evolve the forms that meaning can take.

In future posts, we’ll explore how these attractors interact with individuation—how meme-users negotiate personal expression within shared structures—and how this negotiation shapes the ongoing evolution of the social semiotic itself.

Value and Selection in the Meaning Economy: Rethinking Memes Beyond Replication

In many accounts of memetics, memes are imagined as cultural genes: replicable units that spread by copying themselves across minds and media. This metaphor has been remarkably generative, but it also carries baggage—especially the idea that meme propagation depends primarily on faithful replication. In a semiotic model grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a different view emerges: one in which meaning is not copied, but instantiated, and value, not fidelity, is the central currency.

Rather than asking whether a meme is replicated accurately, we ask what makes a meme worth instantiating again. This is where value and selection become central.

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Memes as Value-Laden Instantiations

In SFL, meanings are structured as systems of potential, and each instance of meaning draws selectively on that potential in a particular context. Memes, on this model, are not fixed units but instantiations of semiotic potential—each one an actualised expression of a meme-type or meme-template, shaped by a particular social and cultural context.

What determines which meme-types persist and which vanish is not simply their structure or recognisability, but the value they carry within the social system. This value may be symbolic (e.g. status, alignment, identity), emotional (e.g. humour, outrage, nostalgia), or pragmatic (e.g. clarity, brevity, timeliness).

In other words, memes succeed because they matter, not because they reproduce flawlessly.

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Selection, not Fidelity

This is not to say that memes aren’t replicated. But replication in a semiotic economy is always selective, and always mediated by social meaning. Each new instantiation is:

• An interpretation, not a mechanical copy.

• A reactivation of a pattern of meaning, not a duplication of form.

• Contextually motivated, rather than structurally determined.

So we don’t discard the idea of replication entirely—we reframe it. What spreads is not a static unit, but a semiotic potential, constrained and reshaped by cultural memory and communicative purpose.

In this light, selection and replication are not opposed, but entangled. It is selection that guides replication, and replication that makes selection visible. Every meme that circulates reflects both the value system of the culture and the interpretive agency of the meme-user.

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The Meaning Economy

This brings us to a broader insight: memes operate within what we can call a meaning economy. In this economy:

• Semiotic forms accrue value based on how well they serve communicative, affective, or ideological functions.

• Users act as semiotic agents, choosing which forms to reinstantiate based on perceived value.

• Memes compete and evolve through selection histories—not natural selection, but cultural selection driven by shared values and shifting contexts.

What this economy selects for is not survival in a literal sense, but resonance, relevance, and recognisability. A successful meme-type is one that people want to use again, know how to adapt, and feel aligns with their communicative goals.

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Conclusion: Memes as Semiotic Selection Events

By moving from a replication model to a value-based selection model, we gain a more flexible and culturally sensitive understanding of memes. In the meaning economy, a meme spreads not because it replicates, but because it is revalued and reselected, again and again, by users navigating a shared semiotic field.

Memes, then, are not just signs that travel—they are selection events, where individual meaning-makers reinstantiate cultural memory according to what matters here and now.

Relational Ontology, Instantiation, and Individuation: Groundwork for a Systemic Model of Memes

To understand how memes function within a general theory of meaning, we must carefully reconstruct the conceptual architecture that supports their integration. In particular, we must ground our model in a relational ontology and distinguish between the processes of instantiation and individuation. These concepts allow us to treat memes not merely as cultural curiosities or replicators, but as meaningful formations within evolving semiotic systems. This post provides the theoretical groundwork to support a more precise systemic-functional account of memetics.

Relational Ontology: Meaning as Emergent Structure

A relational ontology begins by refusing to treat entities as self-contained substances. Instead, what exists is constituted by relations. In systemic-functional linguistics (SFL), meaning is relationally defined: a clause is meaningful not by what it is in itself, but by the role it plays within a system of options.

In this framework:

• Meaning is not a thing but a structured potential, shaped by its position in a system of interrelated possibilities.

• Meaning instances are actualised configurations of these potentials in context.

• Semiotic strata (semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology) are related by realisation, not composition.

Crucially, meaning is not made of words or sounds. It is construed through symbolic abstraction and actualised through semiotic choice. This ontology opens the door to modelling memes as emergent formations in meaning space.

Instantiation: From Potential to Instance

Instantiation refers to the movement from a system of potential meanings to actualised instances of meaning. In SFL:

• The system represents the meaning potential of a semiotic system.

• The instance is a actualised configuration (e.g., a clause, a meme).

• The cline of instantiation runs between these poles, allowing us to locate partial or recurrent structures between full generality and specific occurrence.

When we encounter a meme in the wild (say, an image macro with a familiar format), we are seeing a meaning instance that draws on a semiotic system. But it also belongs to a meme-type—a recognisable pattern of instantiation that is neither a fully general system nor a one-off instance. It sits somewhere along the cline.

Individuation: Who Has Access to What Potential?

Individuation refers to the relation between collective meaning potential (what a culture or community can mean) and individual meaning potential (what a person can mean). Meaning is not equally distributed:

• Some individuals have access to highly elaborated meaning systems (e.g., specialists).

• Others operate within more restricted or differently configured potentials.

Memes, in this context, become a space of semiotic individuation. The collective recognises a meme-type as valid, but each instantiation reflects the individuated meaning potential of the meme-maker. This dynamic allows memes to evolve, shift, or fracture over time.

Why This Matters for Memetics

Previous models of memetics, particularly the one advanced by Dawkins, treated memes as cultural replicators—quasi-biological units transmitted through imitation. But this view is incompatible with a relational, semiotic model of meaning. Instead, we argue:

• Memes are meaning instances: actualised selections from potential.

• Meme-types are semiotic attractors: constrained proto-systems formed through recurrent instantiation.

• Meme evolution is driven by instantiation pressure (how memes are actualised) and individuation pressure (who can mean what within the meme-type).

This shifts the emphasis from replication to variation within constraint—a fundamentally semiotic process.

Next Steps

The next phase of the project will integrate this framework into an account of the meaning economy, where meme-types serve as provisional symbolic formations shaped by memory, context, and constraint.

In short, we are moving from a metaphorical to a systemic-functional model of memes, grounded in relational ontology and sensitive to the clines of both instantiation and individuation.

From Meme to Meaning: Integrating Memes into a General Theory of Meaning

In contemporary culture, memes are often treated as fleeting curiosities—humorous images or phrases that ricochet through social media. But beneath this surface lies a deeper semiotic structure. If we adopt the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), where meaning is understood as a stratified and instantiated phenomenon, then memes offer an important case study for how meaning is individuated, instantiated, and realised across social contexts. To place memes within a general model of meaning, we must first move beyond the popular usage and develop a more systemic understanding of what memes are.

Memes as Meaning Instances

In our general model, meaning is not substance but potential, structured as a system and actualised as instances. This is the foundation of SFL’s cline of instantiation, which relates meaning potential (system) to meaning instance (text). Memes, in their most visible form, are clearly meaning instances. They are semiotic artefacts—configurations of wording, imagery, and logic—that function within social discourse. Like all meaning instances, they are:

• Semiotically stratified: They have a semantic value, realised through lexicogrammar and other strata like visual imagery.

• Contextually situated: Their interpretation depends on field, tenor, and mode.

• Instantial: They draw selectively on meaning potential in order to be actualised.

Yet memes differ from many other kinds of meaning instances in their reproducibility and intertextuality. Each new instantiation is recognisable as a member of a meme-type—an identifiable pattern of semiotic features that remains relatively stable across different texts.

Meme-Types: Constrained Patterns of Instantiation

We propose the term meme-type to capture the semiotic space between the instance and the full system. A meme-type is a recurrent, recognisable pattern of meaning-making that allows multiple instantiations while constraining what counts as a valid variation. Meme-types operate like small-scale meaning potentials, often tightly individuated within communities or discourses. They are:

• Culturally shared: Their semiotic constraints are learned and recognised collectively.

• Structurally constrained: They have internal expectations (e.g., a particular image paired with a two-part caption).

• Flexible but bounded: Variation is possible, but the meme breaks down if the constraint space is violated.

A meme-type, then, is not an instance, nor is it a system in the SFL sense. It is a subsystem within the social semiotic, positioned between instance and system along the cline of instantiation. As such, meme-types can be understood as proto-systems of meaning that emerge through collective memory and practice.

Individuation and the Meme-User

In SFL, individuation refers to the relationship between the collective meaning potential and the meaning potential of individual language users. Memes offer a vivid example of how individuation plays out semiotically. Each meme-user accesses a meme-type from the collective semiotic pool and produces a new instantiation—an individuated meaning instance.

This process is inherently dialogic: the meme-type provides affordances, while the user introduces variation. Through repeated instantiation, meme-users both reproduce and evolve the meme-type, subtly shifting its system of values, references, and implications.

• Memes are thus a site of semiotic negotiation: They balance reproducibility and individuation.

• Memes instantiate memory: Each new meme recalls previous instantiations and updates the collective sense of what the meme-type means.

The Role of Memory in Meme Evolution

Here, Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) offers insight into the material substrate of this semiotic process. Memory, in Edelman’s model, is not the retrieval of stored content, but the selective reactivation of neural circuits. Memory is a property of the system, expressed in the ability to repeat a performance, not to recover a record.

When applied to culture, this suggests that collective memory functions as a selection pressure on the evolution of memes. Just as neural groups are selected for their adaptive value, meme-types are selected and stabilised through social memory:

• Memes persist because they are remembered in usable forms.

• New instantiations reinforce or modify the structure of the meme-type.

• Cultural memory acts as a kind of semiotic fitness landscape.

Thus, the cultural evolution of meme-types parallels the neural evolution of repertoires in the brain. Both are shaped by selection histories that privilege certain patterns of activation over others.

Toward a General Model of Memes in Meaning

By situating memes within the cline of instantiation, and distinguishing between meme-types and meme instances, we can develop a systemic-functional account of memetics. This model is not about the replication of units, as in Dawkins’ original metaphor, but about the activation of constrained semiotic potentials within social systems. Memes are:

• Instantiations of semiotic meaning.

• Selections from collective meaning potential.

• Realisations of cultural memory in context.

And meme-types are:

• Provisional proto-systems of meaning.

• Sites of individuation within a shared culture.

• Cultural attractors that stabilise certain values and orientations.

In this way, we not only align memes with the SFL model of meaning, but we also show how memetics and semiotics can be integrated within a relational ontology. This opens the way for future explorations—of individuation, instantiation, and evolution—as we continue mapping the dynamic semiotic systems that shape our shared realities.

Memes and Meaning: Situating Cultural Replication in a General Model of Meaning

In recent decades, memes have become a dominant mode of cultural expression — compressed units of significance that travel swiftly across social media, mutate in form, and reappear in altered yet recognisable guises. Originally coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) to describe units of cultural transmission, memes have since taken on a life of their own in both popular and scholarly discourse.

But what are memes, really, from the perspective of a general theory of meaning? Rather than treating memes as a separate class of cultural replicators, this post argues that memes are best understood as a subset of meaning instances: actualisations of meaning potential that exhibit high re-instantiability in cultural systems. This reframing allows us to situate memetics within a relational, stratified, and instantiational model of meaning — one that integrates insights from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), theories of individuation, and the dynamics of cultural memory.

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1. From Memetics to Meaning: Shifting the Frame

The original Dawkinsian conception of memes was framed in analogy with genes: cultural units that replicate via imitation, undergo variation, and are subject to selection. While this heuristic proved generative, it also left memetics vulnerable to criticism for its lack of grounding in a coherent theory of meaning.

A better way forward is to see memes not as discrete, gene-like entities, but as meaning instances — instantiations of meaning potential that succeed in achieving re-instantiability across cultural contexts. Memes, then, are not outside the semiotic system; they are emergent products of it, shaped by the same dynamics that govern all meaning-making.

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2. Memes as Meaning Instances with High Reselection Potential

In SFL, meaning arises through the instantiation of structured meaning potential — a network of semantic options that is actualised in context. Each actualisation is a meaning instance, and some of these instances acquire high salience within a culture. Memes are just such instances: they crystallise a relation between meaning and context in a way that prompts repetition, transformation, and sharing.

What makes a meme successful is not merely its form, but its fit with the evolving cultural system. Memes tend to:

• Resonantly instantiate meanings already latent in collective potential,

• Achieve recognisability through semiotic patterning,

• Trigger value-weighted responses that prompt re-instantiation,

• Form their own instantial systems (e.g. meme templates, hashtags, tropes).

Memes are not reducible to their words or images; they are units of meaning in motion — stratified semiotic events that circulate within collective memory and undergo variation through instantiation.

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3. Memory, Instantiation, and the Reselection of Meaning

As we’ve argued elsewhere, memory is not the retrieval of a past state but the systemic capacity to reinstantiate a performance. In this sense, memory is a semiotic process: a dynamic reselection of past meaning potential in new contexts. Cultural memory, then, is not a static archive but a selection pressure on the evolution of meaning.

Memes flourish within this system because they are tuned to the rhythms of cultural memory. Their success depends on how well they activate shared systems of value and expectation. They must balance redundancy (to be recognisable) and novelty (to be interesting). In doing so, they serve as probes into the active regions of collective meaning potential.

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4. Individuation and the Circulation of Cultural Form

From the perspective of individuation — the relation between collective meaning potential and the differing meaning potentials of individual meaners — memes occupy a particularly interesting position. They originate from specific instantiations (individuals producing a meme), but quickly move into a shared symbolic resource space, where they become collective semiotic tools.

This circulation is not trivial. It involves:

• The de-individuation of certain meaning instances (they become group property),

• The formation of instantial systems that can be drawn upon and transformed,

• The potential for memes to shape collective identity, especially through myth-like repetition.

Memes thus contribute to the social semiotic infrastructure of a culture — not merely reflecting meanings, but helping to structure how meaning is made.

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5. Rethinking Memetics: A Semiotic Account

What does this reframing achieve?

• It grounds memes in a relational, stratified ontology of meaning.

• It sees memetic activity as part of the instantiation cycle within a social semiotic system.

• It identifies memory, individuation, and context as key selection pressures in memetic success.

• It dissolves the false dichotomy between biological and cultural replication by treating meaning — not imitation — as the unit of analysis.

Crucially, it allows us to locate memes within a general model of meaning, rather than outside or parallel to it.

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Conclusion: Memes as Meaning in Motion

In the end, memes are not a special category of cultural life, but rather an especially visible subset of how meaning circulates, adapts, and evolves within a culture. When viewed through the lens of systemic-functional semiotics, memes become meaning instances subject to the same pressures of selection, instantiation, and individuation that shape all meaning-making.

What makes memes special is not that they are unique, but that they are highly traceable semiotic events — revealing, through their form and function, the evolving contours of collective memory and shared potential.

In short: memes are meaning in motion — and understanding them means understanding meaning itself.