It is not surprising that LOLcats is percolating into the glare of prime-time; it may not be long before there is a LOLcats brand of cereal and who knows what else.
For the last few months, online regulars have been seeing on various Web sites and blogs pictures of cats and other animals in strange poses, with large type captions embedded in the photos. The grammar and syntax in the captions are atrocious by design. The pictures are called LOLcats, named after the abbreviation for "laughing out loud" used by fans of text and instant messaging.
This is no tragedy. Memes that inflict a strong intellectual or emotional effect on their hosts will break out. Sometimes a wall can be built around a meme complex through the use of discrimination, jargon, initialtion rites, and so on. Such a wall has been maintained by the semi-cloistered online communities of 4chan, fark, and so many others as they developed the LOLcats and the other image macro memes as a communication device. But once Boing Boing got onto this good thing, the positive-feedback bubble dynamic of mainstream attention began. And so has its demise (as something small and special). After all, how big of an audience can an in-joke effectively wink to?
Memes will either wither on the vine that created them and become historical footnoes - or they break out into mass consumption, only to be dilluted by overexploitation and the consumer-creator feedback loop.
But ubiquity - even if it is a bland ubiquity - is still not a bad way for a meme to survive and evolve again.
