Abstract

This article proposes a semiotic reading of the most widely recognized internet image macro memes (termed “canonical image macro memes” or CIMMs) and analyzes these memes as individual texts. It demonstrates that memes possess their own language, or system of signs, and form their own literature. By delineating the extent to which the visual and verbal components are customizeable image macro memes, this article strives to understand the language of CIMMs, and the processes and limitations by which meaning is generated. Understanding each meme as a text, this analysis demonstrates that the first-order semiological system of memes is informed and underpinned by a discrete, highly specific second-order semiological system, which guides the way in which a meme user will read memetic texts both individually and in relation to one another, and which must be analyzed as a phenomenon unto itself. The increasingly complex interreferentiality found within the growing corpus of memetic texts engenders sets of memes which only acquire signification when read together; a consideration of such memes demonstrates the codification of a metalanguage, or mythology, of memes, which allows us to understand better how memes have begun to consolidate their own canon.