Abstract
Ever since the first picture of a cat or dog has been disseminated, reproduced, and altered for further dissemination in the environment of world wide web, Richard Dawkin's concept of meme has been at the forefront for scholars that have wished to understand the complexity of this - now widely spread - phenomenon. These visual messages are treated as if their inner workings resembled a rhizomatic form, with internet and electronic culture researchers lagging behind the novel concepts and intertextualities that are constantly and rapidly created. A promising avenue within this framework is the historiography of internet, aiming at conserving and bringing contextual constructs together, in order to make sense of the bigger picture. However, these efforts still remain boxed in the inductive approach to methodology, and lack in explanation value on a larger scale.
This contribution suggests, that such a way of treating the phenomenon of viral visual stimuli, is fundamentally flawed. Through the explanation and application of Umberto Eco's theory of codes, these visual cues can be re-conceptualized as sign-vehicles for meaning that operate as expressive devices in a synthetic environment. Since the internet is an artificial environment par excellence, traces of primary signifying structures can no-longer enter the discourse as factual continuums, but only as segments of the artificial code system. Such a system is devoid of the real-world organic sign structures that make the usual content analyses too complicated, as argued above. Following this line of thought, cultural significance and socioanthropologic references must first give way to the understanding of what kind of a message has the recipient received and what subsequent meaning was decoded from the process of reading such a message - or from viewing such a picture.
Adopting this approach, it is then possible to construct basic categorization and to compare individual visual iterations on the basis of their differences and similarities, as pertaining to their place and properties as expressive devices in the code system that is present, in order to see beyond the unorganized multitude experienced in the internet memes of today.