Testualità online e ludicità scomponibile: dalla viralità alle pratiche memetiche

The chief point of the article is to question the notion of virality, a heuristically pointless folk category employed to labelling objects that spread outwards over the Internet—mainly catchphrases, captioned pictures, and videos, which are called Internet memes as well. In order to accomplish such a goal, a systematic approach to the Internet textuality is proposed, by invoking the typology of transtextuality, as elaborated by French narratologist Gérard Genette (1982), and the paradigm of spreadability, as outlined by American media scholar Henry Jenkins (et al. 2013). From the standpoint of semiotics, Internet memes are anything but new, albeit they have been almost completely ignored by the discipline; these culturally shared pieces of media are created and spread as hypertexts, namely through a process of transformation and imitation, out of pre-existing texts. A threefold syntactic typology of the Internet phenomena is presented—according to their memeticness, they can be ready-mades or memes proper, namely samples-remixes and remakes; along with a discussion of the semantic facets such texts display, being prominently playful or satirical, due to a striking element which is a mistake, in a broad sense. What may be called memetic practices, based upon a dismountable playfulness, seem to constitute, in linguistic terms, the main stylistic practice online communities do employ today, in order to appropriate cultural contents and negotiate social issues.