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

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.