Approximately one year ago, Eric Nakagawa launched a site entitled “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” and provided one internet meme the focal point with which to start one of our quirkier fads.

A year later most people are familiar with the “LOLCat”, even if they don’t know it by name. The unmistakable combination of cat and garbled text that began with Happy Cat is now inextricably entrenched workforce culture. During last semester’s finals, when disclosed that I had wandered the library navigating browsers to LOLCats, what I didn’t mention was that it was the LOLCats posted everywhere in paper form (they were being used for some flier on stress) that had me thinking about LOLCats in the first place. Some how they had escaped from the ‘nets.

Last fall I had the opportunity to learn a distressingly large amount about LOLCats while writing do research on media comparisons. The resulting paper argued that the relationships between image and text in both LOLCats and silent films share striking similarities. Both captions and intertitles were introduced to augment and extend the possibilities of the visual content. Probably more important, the paper included plenty of pictures of really cute cats.

In the name of those cute cats, I am posting it here. Enjoy!

wants moar: the appropriation of text in the framing of visual media a comparison between LOLcats and intertitles

(cartoon courtesy of xkdc.com)