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

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.