Larsen Idealog

Lolcats

 
Lolcats are a fairly new and strange, but utterly fascinating, internet phenomenon called an image macro. Lolcats (the LOL comes from the chat-speak abbreviation for 'laughing out loud') combine a single image of a cat and a funny headline, usually with numerous spelling and grammatical errors. The exact origin of Lolcats is a bit murky but there is little doubt that their initial purpose was for posting on messageboards and distributing to friends via email. Since then websites such as I Can Has Cheezeburger and others have devoted significant webspace to Lolcats. Their rise in popularity has also attracted the attention of WIRED and Anil Dash, of Six Apart.

The basic motivation for Lolcats is the simple urge to share something funny with someone else. I'm reminded of the photocopied, slightly risque, cartoons my parents used to bring home from the office when I was a kid. Often times these had been Xerox'd so many times they were barely legible. I didn't always understand these cartoons, especially the ones about the office work environment, simply because I wasn't part of the adult/workforce culture. I was twelve and unemployed.

The thing that is being shared in this situation is called a meme, which is a 'unit of cultural information'. The recent rise in 'viral' marketing is aimed at taking advantage of, or creating, these memes and attaching a company or product to their distribution. Burger King's Subservient Chicken and the BMW Films campaign (which credits itself with the creation of 'internet film' and ostensibly viral marketing) are good examples, as is Ray-Ban's recent "Never Hide" campaign. However many of these campaigns will never be anywhere near as successfull as something like Lolcats or Chuck Norris Facts in becoming part of the culture for a generation. Advertisers always seem to over-complicate their messages, or over-diversify the distribution of these messages and fail to tap into that simple human desire to share something with another human being. It seems that advertising has a long way to go in understanding the collective human apects of the internet, and I believe this is the next big struggle in advertising. In some ways it has nothing to do with the internet and everything to do with understanding people. The internet is only a tool that allows us to communicate more openly and more freely than we did before. Those basic human desires and needs have always been present, the internet has only allowed us a new way of satisfying those needs.

Granted, Lolcats are kind of stupid, but it's just one more example of how powerful the combination of new, creative content, and the internet really is. Now get back to work and quit reading chucknorrisfacts.com.