Our minds on media.

Every now and then one of these netmemes gets my attention and I have to waste a few hours checking it all out. I’m not sure what is so compelling about these developments. In part, there are just a large number of talented people out there who can generally contribute some really funny material, but in a way its also like a science experiment. You get to see the prototypical forms develop and then evolve and change. LOLcats is the latest of these online phenomena. It’s been pretty well documented already—on wikipedia, of course. This particular netmeme is composed (mostly) of cats doing stupid things, a unique dialect, as well as a slogan structure and the use of the font Impact. And just for your, enjoyment, I’ve posted some here.

Obviously, rules with regard to this type of developments are pretty fast and loose, but as I mentioned earlier this particular netmeme has a few of them, and one of the things that’s unique is that it has absorbed another pretty common meme “I’m in ur base killing ur d00dz.” That particular meme evolved out of dialog from an online video game in which one player informed the other that while he was away, “I’m in ur base killing ur d00dz.” The grammar and spelling are a cross between typical text message spelling and Leet speak, a geek grammar incorporating odd spellings as well as replacing letters with numbers. The “I’m in ur base” meme even merited it’s own t-shirt. So, by at least one measurement, the LOLcat meme is a 3rd generation netmeme. And the fact that netmemes seem to absorb older netmemes so readily is an interesting quality that would seem to differentiate them from memes spawned by older media. For instance, the LOLcat meme has utilized the snakes-on-a-plane meme as well as fake-transparent-laptop-monitor meme.

I personally find the combination of cats and bad grammar to be endearing for some reason—I assume because I would expect cats to have bad grammar and spelling if they could talk. But any rate, I’ve compiled a contact sheet here of my own favorites. There are thousands of them out there, (and there’s at least one blog devoted to the movement) but I personally like the ones that stick the closest to the “rules” that the first one utilized. You can click on any of them to “zoom in”. And I think the one that wins the blue ribbon (even though they didn’t use the impact font is “This is mah job.”