Virus is a language

"Virus is a language"-expression that playfully reverses the famous sentence of William Burroughs "Language is a virus (from space)"-can effectively synthesize the possibility of semiotics to analyze phenomena such as virality, and several other communicative practices related to web (but not only to it), and more generally to the active and participatory fruition of media. These practices seem to place in question the centrality and even the same heuristic validity of the notion of text which for decades had been the specific election ground of semiotic analysis. In fact, if there is a space for the semiotic analysis of these phenomena it is because they refer in any case to some form of "language", and language (intended as "semiotic system", which is something different from the natural language) is precisely the object of knowledge sought by the general semiotics. In doing so, the paper proposes three different levels in which it is possible exert semiotic analysis of virality and other similar media phenomena.