Lolcat

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Lolcat is an internet phenomenon in the form of humorous images. Photos of cats are shown with appropriate, orthographically , punctuationally and grammatically incorrect words in their mouths. The authors of the Lolcats mostly remain anonymous and distribute their works on the Internet. The so-called lolspeak is placed in the mouth of the cats, which molds the deviations from standard English into its own conventions. In the meantime this has solidified to such an extent that it also leads a life of its own without pictures of cats. The book How to Take Over Teh Wurld: A LOLCat Guide 2 Winning. stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a total of 13 weeks in the winter of 2008/2009 . A Bible translation has been running in Lolspeak since 2007, and a Lolcat musical was performed in the summer of 2009.

A Lolcat picture in "I'm in ur ..." format.

history

The name Lolcat comes from LOL (stands for "loud laugh") and "cat" (English for cat). Lolcats first appeared in the 4chan forum in 2006 . The so-called Caturday developed in the forum - the cat pictures were posted mainly on Saturdays ( Cat + Saturday ), the channel users actively complained about members who posted Lolcats on other days. From the forum, the trend spread over the Internet and became an email phenomenon. In a short time, a trend developed that tens of thousands of Internet users joined.

One such cat email also reached Erik Nagakawa from Hawaii with an email from his girlfriend and later blog co-founder Kari Unebasami. Nagakawa was enthusiastic enough to devote a blog to the topic . On January 11, 2007, Nagakawa founded the Icanhascheezburger.com blog . The blog started with a picture of a cat asking just that. That same year, Ben Huh took over the website for $ 2.25 million and began turning it into a commercial venture. Unlike most websites, Icanhascheezburger was in the black from the start. Huh has founded or bought various other related websites, all of which are owned by Pet Holdings . The more successful of these are, for example, Probablybadnews and Failblog , which played a key role in spreading the “fail” Internet phenomenon . By mid-2009 it had attracted more than 10 million unique visitors per month, and by May 2010 the number had risen to 16 million. The number of visitors tripled in the first two years. Huh himself gives interviews through the English-language press world.

In the summer of 2009, Icanhascheezburger received around 10,000 images a day, which the 20 employees looked through and posted on the website. By 2010 the number rose to 40 employees, who handled the 18,000 daily submissions for 53 different pages. According to Huh, one of the most important reasons for success is that it looks as if everything was made by enthusiastic amateurs - so the employees do not invent their own images or edit the submissions editorially, but only select the most suitable in their opinion. The operators do not pay attention to copyrights when selecting the images, but remove images as soon as someone complains about them. According to the operator, around 1 percent of the users are permanent users, from whom most of the content comes, while 99 percent only occasionally visit the website. Huh himself estimates that the Lolcats Network generates around 10 percent of all WordPress traffic.

to form

Lolcats provide pictures of - mostly cute - animals with captions. They limit the various levels of meaning that an uncommented picture can take up and point the viewer in a certain direction of interpretation. The Lolcats' copywriters often aim to surprise the viewer and give the image a meaning that is not obvious at first glance.

Lolcats are one of the more popular forms of image macros , in which internet users combine an image with text to create a humorous effect. Image macros are much older than Lolcats on the Internet. They first developed in internet forums, the term itself probably going back to the Something Awful forum. The main conventions for designing these macros developed in 4chan . Accordingly, cats are usually shown, although there are also variants with other animals, such as the lolrus , an elephant seal named Minazo, which is assumed to be longing for a blue bucket as a running gag .

The Lolcats now use certain grammatical rules for correct and incorrect Lolspeak as well as a solid fund of motifs and constellations: The cats are often humanized , the text itself is strongly influenced by the language conventions that are used by young users of SMS and Instant Messengers and Leetspeak . Allusions to computer games, internet culture and science fiction are common.

The makers of the Lolcats use both dialogic and explanatory text , similar to older forms of text-image combination ( silent films, for example). While the dialogical text is put directly into the cats' mouths, follows the pattern of an intentionally incorrect grammar and falls back on scene language, the explanatory text uses standard English. The deviation from standard English can be weighted in the dialog text. On images with different old cat, for example, the older cat is placed a standardized English in the mouth usually while kittens often a strong sense LOLspeak "talk".

The font is also largely standardized. In the 4chan forum as well as in later pictures, the copywriters almost exclusively use white Impact font with thin black borders.

Recurring motifs are:

  • Invisible objects: the cat's facial expressions and gestures are interpreted as an interaction with an imaginary object. For example, if a cat stretches its arms and opens its mouth, an "invisible sandwich" is placed in its mouth.
  • Appropriation: A cat stays in a certain place or presents itself in a certain way, so that it can be assumed to have taken possession, usurpated or entered. This is how you let a cat say in the fridge: "im in ur fridge / eatin ur f00dz" ("I'm in your fridge / eat your food").
  • Request: A faithful-looking cat makes a request. This includes the picture “i can has cheezburger?” (For example: “I can have Cheezburger [sic!] ?”), Which was the first undisputed Lolcat picture.
  • Recourse to English translations of Japanese texts in Engrish and their typical errors. Well-known example here is Oh Hai! instead of hi .
  • Lolspeak - which only spread with the establishment of Icanhascheezburger.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Konrad Lischka: Childlike kitty English overflows online forums. In: Spiegel Online . SPIEGEL ONLINE GmbH, January 20, 2008, accessed on October 28, 2009 .
  2. ^ Lev Grossman: Creating a Cute Cat Frenzy . In: Time , July 2007. Archived copy ( memento of the original from August 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / fcrunk.wellimean.com
  3. ↑ a b c Brubaker pp. 121-123
  4. ↑ a b Kim-Mai Cutler: I Can Has 1 Billion Pageviews? In: DigitalBeat. VentureBeat, October 5, 2009, archived from the original on March 17, 2010 ; accessed on October 28, 2009 .
  5. ^ A b c Laura Fitzpatrick: Building a Media Empire Around I Can Has Cheezburger. In: Time.com. Time Inc., August 24, 2009, p. 2 , accessed October 28, 2009 .
  6. ↑ Star Tribune : If you give a cat a keyboard. (No longer available online.) In: gazette.com. Freedom Communications, Inc., July 26, 2007, archived from the original on August 19, 2009 ; accessed on October 28, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gazette.com
  7. ↑ a b c Brubaker pp. 118–119
  8. ↑ a b Mark Abley: The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008 ISBN 0618571221
  9. ↑ Brubaker pp. 117-118
  10. ↑ a b c d Jenna Wortham: Once Just a Site With Funny Cat Pictures, and Now a Web Empire in: New York Times, June 13, 2010
  11. ↑ http://www.golem.de/1101/80796.html
  12. ↑ Ben Zimmer: How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection , The New York Times . August 7, 2009. Accessed September 9, 2009. 
  13. ^ A b Laura Fitzpatrick: Building a Media Empire Around I Can Has Cheezburger. In: Time.com. Time Inc., August 24, 2009, p. 1 , accessed October 28, 2009 .
  14. ↑ shinychris: FOWA Expo Day One: I Can Has Cheez Burger. In: techdigest.tv. Shiny Media, October 10, 2008, accessed October 28, 2009 .
  15. ↑ Brubaker pp. 123-124
  16. ↑ a b c Aaron Rutkoff: With 'LOLcats' Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke. In: The Wall Street Journal . August 25, 2007, accessed October 28, 2009 .
  17. ↑ Popular Enoshima aquarium seal dies after 10 1/2-year run
  18. ↑ a b Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear: Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridzation. in: Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52 (1) September 2008 pp. 28–29
  19. ↑ Simon Rohling: "HALP! Therez LOLCats Evrywhare!" In: Telepolis. Heinz Heise Verlag, November 2, 2007, accessed October 28, 2009 .
  20. ↑ Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar. (No longer available online.) April 23, 2007, archived from the original on December 31, 2009 ; accessed on October 28, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / dashes.com

Remarks

  1. ↑ a b In addition to the name Lolspeak, there is also the widespread name Kitty- Pidgin . Proof of use can be found at Simon Rohling: "HALP! Therez LOLCats Evrywhare!" In: Telepolis. Heise Zeitschriften Verlag, November 2, 2007, accessed on July 23, 2010 : "The LOLCat language, the 'Kitty-Pidgin'"

literature

Web links

Commons : Lolcats  - collection of images, videos and audio files