Sara Cannizzaro

This article argues for a clearer framework of internet-based “memes”. The science of memes, dubbed ‘memetics’, presumes that memes remain “copying units” following the popularisation of the concept in Richard Dawkins’ celebrated work, The Selfish Gene (1976). Yet Peircean semiotics and biosemiotics can challenge this doctrine of information transmission. While supporting a precise and discursive framework for internet memes, semiotic readings reconfigure contemporary formulations to the – now-established – conception of memes. Internet memes can and should be conceived, then, as habit-inducing sign systems incorporating processes involving asymmetrical variation. So, drawing on biosemiotics, Tartu-Moscow semiotics, and Peircean semiotic principles, and through a close reading of the celebrated 2011 Internet meme Rebecca Black’s Friday, this article proposes a working outline for the definition of internet memes and its applicability for the semiotic analysis of texts in new media communication.

This article explores the usefulness of interdisciplinarity as method of enquiry by proposing an investigation of the concept of information in the light of semiotics. This is because, as Kull, Deacon, Emmeche, Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt state, information is an implicitly semiotic term (Biological Theory 4(2):167–173, 2009: 169), but the logical relation between semiosis and information has not been sufficiently clarified yet. Across the history of cybernetics, the concept of information undergoes an uneven development; that is, information is an ‘objective’ entity in first order cybernetics, and becomes a ‘subjective’ entity in second order cybernetics. This contradiction relegates the status of information to that of a ‘true’ or ‘false’ formal logic problem. The present study proposes that a solution to this contradiction can be found in Deely’s reconfiguration of Peirce’s ‘object’ (as found in his triadic model of semiosis) into ‘thing’ and ‘object’ (Deely 1981). This ontology allows one to argue that information is neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’, and to suggest that, when considered in light of its workability, information can be both true and false, and as such it constitutes an organism’s purely objective reality (Deely 2009b). It is stated that in the process of building such a reality, information is ‘motivated’ by environmental, physiological, emotional (including past feelings and expectations) constraints which are, in turn, framed by observership. Information is therefore found in the irreducible cybersemiotic process that links at once all these conditions and that is simultaneously constrained by them. The integration of cybernetics’ and semiotics’ understanding of information shows that history is the analytical principle that grants scientific rigour to interdisciplinary investigations. As such, in any attempt to clarify its epistemological stance (e.g. the semiotic aspect of information), it is argued that biosemiotics does not need only to acknowledge semiotics (as it does), but also cybernetics in its interdisciplinary heritage.

There seems to be a relation or some sort of 'unity' between man's works and the spontaneously occurring works produced by nature such as shells, nests, horns and so on. To use Bertalanffy's term for describing common properties of objects or systems (1973), nature's forms and human forms are isomorphic. For example, efficient structures typical of shells or plants such as spirals and radii, are very common archetypes that recur throughout the whole body of humans' architecture. A spiral form can be easily found in the design of the pavement of a square, the staircase of a building or the cupola of a church, while plant's radiated structures have been beautifully utilised in Gothic architecture in the form of fan vaults. Therefore a certain relation between natural and human models appears evident. But one may easily argue on the legitimacy of hypothesising this very relation. How does such visible evidence entails 'truth' or, generally, a true causal relation? This question immediately raises another one: until what extent should we trust our senses – in this specific case, sight- and, more in general, what type of knowledge do perceptions provide? In the aesthetic framework provided by the discussion on the relation between human and natural forms, this paper proposes a synthetic treatment of inferential methods, with emphasis on abduction. Being the only method of scientific enquiry that takes in serious consideration the fallible-but-creative knowledge-generation potential of perceptions, abduction allows to argue not only that there is a necessarily link between human and natural forms, but that indeed this relation is causal. In other words, human aesthetics is profoundly and primarily shaped by natural evolution.

Much contemporary applied, and externally-funded research requires interdisciplinarity to tackle complex world problems for sustainable future living, especially in the sciences. However, interdisciplinarity is a more difficult approach to adopt in the humanities, as these tend to remain largely skeptical about confronting ideas, findings and methods from the sciences. In order to counteract disciplinary insulation in the humanities, this chapter will attempt to integrate ideas originally developed in the sciences into established theories in the humanities. It will do so by proposing, firstly, to substitute the multimodal notion of ‘motivation’ for a less anthropomorphic notion of context, conceived broadly as cybersemiotics constraints. This reconfiguration of context allows the cultural analyst to identify the feelings-emotional, environmental, physiological, erroneous, and second-order cybernetics’ observership constraints of verbal communication and culture. Secondly, this chapter will also argue that the originally mathematical idea of modelling system, developed in semiotics by Chernov, Lotman and Sebeok, and resonant of Brier’s cybersemiotics, would be more appropriate for cultural analysis rather than ‘discourse’. This reconfiguration of discourse into modelling system could enrich Critical Discourse Analysis, including the multimodal type, on the basis of its pragmaticist, qualia-rich and phylogenetic stance. The benefit of such integrative initiative is that a cybersemiotic-inspired analysis of discourse in culture, can produce interpretations driven by a new polis, one that is not so much self-obsessed with the unicity of the human-animal species, and that always situates culture and society within a wider ecosystem.

There seems to be a relation or some sort of 'unity' between man's works and the spontaneously occurring works produced by nature such as shells, nests, horns and so on. To use Bertalanffy's term for describing common properties of objects or systems (1973), nature's forms and human forms are isomorphic. For example, efficient structures typical of shells or plants such as spirals and radii, are very common archetypes that recur throughout the whole body of humans' architecture. A spiral form can be easily found in the design of the pavement of a square, the staircase of a building or the cupola of a church, while plant's radiated structures have been beautifully utilised in Gothic architecture in the form of fan vaults. Therefore a certain relation between natural and human models appears evident. But one may easily argue on the legitimacy of hypothesising this very relation. How does such visible evidence entails 'truth' or, generally, a true causal relation? This question immediately raises another one: until what extent should we trust our senses – in this specific case, sight- and, more in general, what type of knowledge do perceptions provide? In the aesthetic framework provided by the discussion on the relation between human and natural forms, this paper proposes a synthetic treatment of inferential methods, with emphasis on abduction. Being the only method of scientific enquiry that takes in serious consideration the fallible-but-creative knowledge-generation potential of perceptions, abduction allows to argue not only that there is a necessary link between human and natural forms, but that this link is indeed is causal. In other words, human aesthetics is profoundly and primarily shaped by natural evolution.

We consider Charles Sanders Peirce’s insights regarding the dynamics he associated with the concept of habit, so that we might periscope into some realms he left under-explicit: first, culture itself, and then, addiction, the forms of which are necessarily relative to particular cultures at particular times. Peirce’s groundwork on habit includes deliberations on instinct, habituescence (the taking of habits), the habit of habit-taking, and the changing of habits, enabling us to think through individual habits that are both marked and unmarked (that is, noticed or not), and how these feed into contemporary cultural practices whether deemed to be innocuous or extreme. With respect to extreme habits, we use the term “addiction” as a suitable gloss for behaviors marked by actual or perceived dysfunction, regardless of any involvement of use or abuse of substances. Finally, we propose that Peirce’s reflections on habits (perhaps colored by his own habits-unto-addictions), and particularly his phanaeroscopy (phenomenology) of thirds—moving from vagueness to generality, from belief to doubt, from habit-taking to habit-breaking—suggest paths for exploring the debate surrounding the “reversibility” or “irreversibility” of addictions, including implications for self-control, and in turn, for our increasingly domesticated 21st-century society.