I keep sane by having a kaleidescope of friends who make sense of reality in drastically differing ways, often in total opposition to each other.
For example, I have friends who hate hippies, love hippies, are hippies and don't believe in hippies. This week, I had conversations about the advantages of the old
"Killer Instinct: Gold" combo system, the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,
fractal quilt design, the editing test for
Men's Fitness magazine, the devolution of the
Democratic Party, the best way to deal with
Hamlet's father's ghost in a modernized production, how to cook a perfect pot of
greens, sexual dimorphism in
angler fish, whether finding Elvis attractive in the
1968 Comeback Special hints at homosexuality,
habeas corpus, the right and wrong way to make prehistoric
paper mache animals with coat hangers, continuity in the
"He-Man" cartoon series, the origin of the word testify, the connection between
"Sasuke" and
"Takeshi's Castle," and the advantages of using
MDMA in marriage counseling.
I need this sort of thing, or I might explode. I'm an information omnivore. Oh, thank you
Flying Spaghetti Monster, thank you for the Internet. Thank you for net culture.
This is why I was an early convert to Internet-based journalism and literature. This is how I became addicted to
Wikipedia and
Rotten.com.
If you spend/have spent as much time as I do/have online, you begin to sense some of the latent functions of this medium. The Internet (yes, it is capitalized according to the
Associated Press Stylebook) is the true melting pot, the true mixing bowl of subcultures and deviance. Out of it have emerged new cultures.
Sure, people self-segregate, but for people like myself this just makes it easier to buzz from flower to flower. I love to visit the
Furries and the
Kirk/Spock gay erotic art groups, the
Bible thumpers and the
body modifiers.
Sociologists must go through a lot of pants when they cruise the digital realm because subcultures are constantly spawning subcultures to the point there is a sort of electronic gravy made from all these people meeting online and simmering in the juices of screen-to-screen communication.
Leetspeak and
macros are two of my favorite aspects of Internet-specific subcultures.
Like most Web-based subcultures, shared aspects arise in places where people interact the most directly - forums, social networking websites, chatrooms and Web 2.0 incarnations.
Strangely enough, though American culture is far less literate than in previous decades, we read all day long and communicate through written language possibly more than ever so in history. Words are the currency of text messaging, emails, blogs and websites. This may or may not be a good thing, considering how our communications within these arenas are so economical and utilitarian. The long-form, eloquent email is a rare bird in the cyberjungle.
Still, a fusion of sorts between learned, direct language and rapid, practical digital missives takes place with
leetspeak and
macros. Both relay a great deal of information in a small burst of code. Each depends on the receiver of the information having working knowledge of the culture and its references. In a sense, these serve as
argots, and help identify both sides of the information transfer as belonging to the subculture where they appear. The in-joke is part of the communication. The separation of
ingroup and
outgroup helps drive the rapid evolution of both leetspeak and macros.
Although leetspeak has been around for a while, it has mutated into several formats, thus creating a continuum of Internet prose. At its most basic, leetspeak is pure written language slang originally used to get ideas across faster than spelling out commonly used terms like, "away from keyboard," which became AFK. Over time, usage of the acronym allowed for descriptive expressions like "He's gone AFK."
At the high-end, elitist leetspeak features letters and numbers mixed together and references to computer hacking skills are applied to everyday life; at the low end, cute terms used in text messaging and MySpace are filled mainly with acronyms for common phrases.
High-End Example: p43ar my l337 sk11lz0rz!!!1!!1
Translation: You should be fearful of my powerful computer hacking abilities.
Fear = p43ar; elite = l337; skill = sk11lz0rz.
Notice also the exclamation points include intentional errors simulating the furious smashing of the 1 key while holding shift to get the ! symbol. Someone really going crazy on the !!!!! often misses a shift press in there somewhere. Other words commonly used like "pwnd" follow the same architecture. If you defeated someone at a video game, you might exclaim the slang term, "owned!" This word has its own evolution, but once it enters into the leetspeak lexicon, it gets a new life. People rapidly typing "owned" during online game play commonly missed the o on the keyboard and typed "pwned" instead. Eventually, this became the preferred spelling along with "pwnd." Now, there are several derivatives of the word including the state of defeat as delivered by the utterer of, "Pwnage."
In the beginning, the whole phrase depends on your understanding of not just the language, but the etymology's of its terms and symbols. After repeated uses, the etymology no longer matters, just as it doesn't in normal, common English. The difference with leetspeak is how it evolves at a rapid pace so it may remain fresh and full of in-jokes and references. There is a non-directed, systemic quality to leetspeak encouraging people to play with it, experiment and add. With leetspeak, we have finally created a written language where the rules of slang are dominant.
If you have ever heard someone say "l-o-l," enunciating each letter one at a time, you have heard the the pitter patter of the next steps in human language and this blog entry. People go so far as say the three letters as a word,"Lol," or "Lawl."
Leetspeak hinges on it being read and not spoken. But, as people spend more time online, and spend more time with others who also spend time online, it becomes acceptable to maintain in group status by using leetspeak in spoken form. Thus, I've heard people say (phonetically) "pawnage," "powned," "pawned," "p-owned," and so on.
Ok, thanks for keeping up. Here comes the kicker.
This has a cyclical quality as well. Eventually, these spoken versions of leetspeak are reintroduced into the written language of the Internet. Often, it goes something like this:
Someone uses lol, which turns into the spoken "l-o-l," which then becomes "lol" but sounds like "lawl," and at some point someone in a forum thread, in response to something funny, puts up an image of
Lal, the name of Data's daughter from a single, obscure "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode. It's a big inside joke on several levels, and the creator gets golf claps for pulling together all these references into one simple understatement. Everyone who gets it belongs in the in group, and the behavioral cycle is encouraged and repeated.
The image macro is born out of this cycle.
Forums typically put new posts underneath older ones. So, a direct response to someone's rant about the coming police state in America may be immediately followed by an image of Captain America crying. Everyone gets the reference and the idea. This is a very high-level, metacommunication format.
Consider how difficult it is for computers to identify faces. Consider how confirmation keys are now images so computers can't understand what is being communicated. Consider the new confirmation keys where a series of images are displayed and the user must pick which one of these is not like the other. Computers have a terrible time with this kind of task.
Communication through images is a powerful way to pass complex ideas back and forth. You see Captain America crying, and you understand a concept that would take several paragraphs of exposition.
So, image macros have really blossomed online in the last few years. Many of them take a slant on an existing
meme circulating across the Internet. Of course, most of them are also designed to make you laugh along with solidifying in group status and also getting a point across.
For instance:
<-- Someone is being overly dramatic.
Someone has posted something you would like to see more of. -->
<-- Someone is being a dick. These image macros influence new leetspeak, which in turn influences new spoken leetpeak and new macros. All of this churns at a rapid pace and evolves with each new generation. Eventually, something like the
"O RLY?" owls or the
lolcats comes along and splinters the whole language schema into a new branch where all new in jokes, references and acceptable formats are born.
Lolcats are image macros featuring cats captioned with a specific form of language, one with no definitive label as of yet. I've seen it referred to as Kittahh and Kitteh before, but nothing has stuck. A clinical term,
kitty pidgin, has also been coined because there seems to be some sort of order to the way sentences are constructed. The language may also derive from
Meowchat, an
IRC group who used to use similar diction when pretending to be cats online.
The phrase is usually white text with a solid black outline, and the grammar is consistently awful, as if the cat was trying to speak English but just couldn't get the conjugation right. Some have suggested these macros were inspired by the old
cat inspirational poster, "Hang in there." Others suggest these simply fall into place with a
long history of using anthropomorphized animals to get our kicks. Most agree the first examples of this meme appeared at the image-sharing message board
4chan where new cat macros were posted on what affectionately became known as Caturdays. These macros are used like any other, but for some reason, these have struck a chord and are mutating at an alarming rate. Now, there are several subgenres of lolcats including:
Invisible
Harbls
Oh Hai
I eated
I has...
I'm in ur...
In addition to the subgenres, new offshoots of the lolcats adhering to the same grammar rules are spawning:
Walrus (Lolrus) w/bucket
Each subgenere and offshoot influences the others laterally, and the in jokes and references generated by the lolcats appear across the whole universe of macros. Some seem to have storylines. Some are direct responses to previous macro postings. For example, an invisible sandwich might soon be followed by a visible one.
Perhaps this chart will help to make sense of this.
The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.
It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information.
Strunk and White would probably be appalled, but then again, maybe not.
After all, a single image of a cat being struck by the sudden realization of how all this connects is the ultimate in clean, succinct and direct dialog.
Flowers for Bill
Reflections on Bill Hicks
The Value of Chewing Slowly
My 10 days with Hurricane Katrina
No One's Martyr
The life and death of Pat Tillman
I Am A Man
The state of the modern male
Fumbling for a Metaphor
My first flying lesson
Labels: culture, image macro, internet, lolcat, sociology
I've been contacted by a major American news organization for an interview concerning the lolcats phenomenon.
(Imagine Brian William's voice: 'Even if you only spend a few moments online a day you've probably seen the lolcats, a new Internet phenomenon sweeping the World Wide Web. Just what are these strange pictures all about? NBC's Fartneck Taintpudding in New York explains.')
Users in the middle stratum remember when the Internet was just a cluster of BBS enthusiasts. They remember when computers featured little more than green text on black screens, and they still used them back then to connect, share, collaborate and download dwarf porn.
It's kind of like how the car entered our society. The first owners had to have a working knowledge of how to repair their machines and understood how everything under the hood and between the axles operated. Given the tools and materials, they could build their own car. As the car became an inescapable part of modern life, some people who were intimidated by them or hesitant to change began to assimilate but never learned what a carburetor was. People who grew up with them already knew how to operate them, but by that time the technology was so streamlined and user-friendly they didn't need to know how to change their own oil because specialists would do that for them.
