We R in Ur Webz
The story behind LOLCats, I Can Has Cheezburger and other ‘meme’ sites.
So I herd u like mudkips.
Oh noez. Wer didz da floorz go?
Ceiling Cat is watching you …
If you don’t have the foggiest idea what we’re talking about, you’re probably unfamiliar with LOLcats, one of the stranger phenomena to emerge from the Weird Wide Web. Quite possibly, you also limit your associations to people who are reasonably sane.
LOLcats — that’s short for “laugh out loud” cats – are simply images of cats emblazoned with a giant caption reading along the lines of the oddball phrases above. Posted on public message boards to be shared by millions, these captioned critters have spawned an online craze.
Welcome to the world of Internet memes. Any nugget of digital media that has caused a major online buzz — a doctored photo, a video clip, a rumor, catch phrase or scam — can qualify as a meme. Typically, they first circulate in small online communities before being catapulted to fame by means of a few million clicks. The next thing you know, people are talking about LOLcats or laughing about Star Wars Kid and Chuck Norris Facts around the water cooler.
That’s the essence of Internet memes (rhymes with “dreams”): They are inside jokes that have hit the big time. They’re frivolous, though the best ones are genuinely entertaining. They’re viral and contagious, but not measurably bad for you.
Let’s back up a few years.
What do you meme?
If you were to ask a philosopher what a “meme” is, she’d define a term coined in 1976 by an Oxford professor named Richard Dawkins. In a nutshell, Dawkins sought a simple term for a “unit of cultural transmission” — a complex idea that can be boiled down and easily shared. Fusing the words mime (for the replication of ideas) and gene (for the role genes play in evolution), he came up with meme.
Though Dawkins had something a bit more sophisticated in mind, some of the cultural units we’re transmitting over the Web today happen to take the shape of fat cats. LOLcats, the Internet equivalent of those porcelain kittens and puppies so beloved by grandmothers, first came to fame in 2006 and soon appeared by the litter on the image boards of sites such as I Can Has Cheezburger. They draw millions of views because they are simple, innocuous and occasionally amusing. People apparently find them cute ’n cuddly, though in reality it’s kind of hard to snuggle up to JPEG.
