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conditions and thus results in an entirely “new” semiotic process, allowing new 

semiotic modes and resources to be involved in the repetition process 

(Leppänen et al. 2014). The specific affordances for responsive and sharing 

activities offered by social media platforms are thus not unified or homogeneous: 

we can distinguish a gradient from purely responsive uptake to active and 

redirected re-entextualization and resemiotization, blurring the distinction made 

by Shifman between virality and memicity.  

Let us have a closer look at memes now, and focus again on the different genres 

of memic activity we can discern. 

The weird world of memes 

As we have seen, Shifman locates the difference between virality and memicity in 

the degree to which the sign itself is changed in the process of transmission and 

circulation. Memes are signs the formal features of which have been changed by 

users. Shifman draws on Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976), 

who coined “meme” by analogy with “gene” as “small cultural units of 

transmission (…) which are spread by copying or imitation” (Shifman 2011: 

188). We have already seen, however, that even simple “copying” or “imitation” 

activities such as Facebook “sharing” involve a major shift in activity type called 

re-entextualization. Memes – often multimodal signs in which images and texts 

are combined – would typically enable intense resemiotization as well, in that 

original signs are altered in various ways, generically germane – a kind of 

“substrate” recognizability would be maintained – but situationally adjusted and 

altered so as to produce very different communicative effects. Memes tend to 

have an extraordinary level of semiotic productivity which involves very different 

kinds of semiotic activity – genres, in other words. 

Let us consider Figures 2-3-4 and 5-6-7. In Figure 2 we see the origin of a 

successful meme, a British World War II propaganda poster. 

 

Figure 2: British wartime propaganda poster. 

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A virtually endless range of resemiotized versions of this poster went viral since 

the year 2000; they can be identified as intertextually related by the speech act 

structure of the message (an adhortative “keep calm” or similar statements, 

followed by a subordinate adhortative) and the graphic features of lettering and 

layout (larger fonts for the adhortatives, the use of a coat of arms-like image). 

Variations on the memic theme range from minimal to maximal, but the generic 

template is constant. Figure 3 shows a minimally resemiotized variant in which 

lettering and coat of arms (the royal crown) are kept, while in Figure 5, the royal 

crown has been changed by a beer mug. 

 

Figure 3: Keep calm and call Batman 

 

Figure 4: Keep calm and drink beer. 

 

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In Figures 2-3-4 we see how one set of affordances – the visual architecture of 

the sign and its speech act format – becomes the intertextual link enabling the 

infinite resemiotizations while retaining the original semiotic pointer: most 

users of variants of the meme would know that the variants derive from the 

same “original” meme. The visual architecture and speech act format of the 

“original”, thus, are the “mobile” elements in memicity here: they provide memic-

intertextual recognizability, while the textual adjustments redirect the meme 

towards more specific audiences and reset it in different frames of meaning and 

use.  

The opposite can also apply, certainly when memes are widely known because of 

textual-stylistic features: the actual ways in which “languaging” is performed 

through fixed expressions and speech characteristics. A particularly successful 

example of such textual-stylistic memicity is so-called “lolspeak”, the particular 

pidginized English originally associated with funny images of cats (“lolcats”), but 

extremely mobile as a memic resource in its own right. Consider Figure 5-6-7. 

Figure 5 documents the origin of this spectacularly successful meme: a picture of 

a cat, to which the caption “I can has cheezburger?” was added, went viral in 

2007 via a website “I can has cheezburger?”. The particular caption phrase went 

viral as well and became tagged to a wide variety of other images – see Figure 6. 

The caption, then, quickly became the basis for a particular pidginized variety of 

written English, which could in turn be deployed in a broad range of contexts 

(see Figure 7). The extraordinary productivity of this meme-turned-language-

variety was demonstrated in 2010, when a team of “lolspeak” authors completed 

a translation of the entire Bible in their self-constructed language variety. The 

Lolcat Bible can now be purchased as a book through Amazon. 

 

Figure 5: I can has cheezburger? 

 

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Figure 6: President and a possible voter having cheezburger 

 

 

 

Figure 7: I has a dream. 

The different resources that enter into the production of such memes can turn 

out to be memic in themselves; we are far from the “copying and imitating” used 

by Dawkins in his initial definition of memes. People, as we said, are 

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