Semiotics of virality. From social contagion to Internet memes

The aim of this article is to provide an outline of the semiotics of virality in its different cultural ramifications: from the notion of contagion employed in 19th-century social sciences to contemporary Internet memes on social media, passing through the viral marketing of the 1990s. Semioticians will find a possible guide to understanding memes and non-semioticians will find a possible guide to shedding light on objects of study such as memes in a new way, thanks to the semiotic gaze. Virality is understood in the framework of appropriative hypertextuality, discussed with regard to its semantic, syntactic and pragmatic components and conceived, via memes, as the main meta-macro-discursive framework in communication to date. Great care is devoted to the mapping of the most recent bibliography and to the philology and archeology of online sources.