La formula della viralità

The paper reconstructs the origins of the notion of “contagion” within social sciences in the late XIX century, the notion of “meme” within cultural evolutionism due to biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 and the rise and spread of this metaphor in public discourse, with special attention to marketing between 1990s and 2000s; the myth of a “formula of virality” was elaborated within digital marketing in these years. By “Internet memes” we identify pieces of media that spread online “virally”, being mainly playful catchphrases, captioned pictures and videos. Semiotics may help in the systematic understanding of such cultural contents; it is possible to: distinguish between the viral spread (of a single ready–made content; i.e. token) and the memetic, or hypertextual (in a Genettean sense), one (the practice of creating new contents on the basis of a pre–existing model; i.e. type); articulate their components through the semantic (featuring a figurative, striking element), syntactic (featuring a template) and pragmatic (users may appropriate contents in different ways and according to different degrees of agency, for different purposes) dimensions; shed new light on the ways we interact on social media (stressing the phatic function and identity value of communication). There is no such a thing as a “formula of virality”; in fact, virality itself embraces the forms of formulaic communication, wherein each single user may express themselves idiosyncratically: by either letting themselves being “infected” or contrasting broadcasted messages, in order to participate in the flow of online discourse.