Joshua Green is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and research manager of the Convergence Culture Consortium where he leads a team exploring the changing media landscape. Before coming to MIT, he worked as a researcher in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT in Brisbane, Australia. Green has published work on participatory culture and the relationship between producers and consumers, television scheduling strategies, the history of Australian television, and the construction of the cultural public sphere. His current research interests include participatory audiences and co-created media content. "Cats, the internet, and tactical communities" emerges from reflections on the shifting way social relations are structured via media content and technological devices.

http://convergenceculture.org
MIT C3

http://www.cci.edu.au/about.php
ARC at QUT Brisbane

Artwork for this article by Alex Nijathaworn

Once revered by ancient Egyptians as an emblem of grace and poise, cats have once again risen to a position of particular cultural prominence. Riding invisible bicycles, demanding cheeseburgers, and regularly in need of "Halp!", pictures of cats caught mid-adventure and annotated with grammatically playful captions have emerged as a recent manifestation of the internet meme.Time magazine's profile of the lolcat phenomenon ("lol" being an acronym for "laugh out loud" used in internet forums) describes internet memes as a form of cultural curiosity,"a running gag", often possessed of a "mindless, goofy quality", that self-replicates across the "collective imagination" of the internet. More than just a running gag, however, the internet meme serves as an object around and through which communities are formed. While perhaps apparently "mindless" in form, they provide a sort of cultural glue that's used in a variety of ways to bring people together across an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/
Lolcats

In an era of converging media that features ever-increasing levels of connectivity and creative consumers who not only have access to sophisticated digital manipulation tools but the skills to use them and an easy means to distribute their content, the internet meme has become an ever more common occurrence. Indeed, Time's profile concludes by bemoaning their mainstreaming, pointing a finger at the increasing popularity of viral marketing strategies for moving the internet meme out of the domain of subculture and further into the cultural spotlight.

Despite their mainstreaming, internet memes are still considered a somewhat weightless phenomenon. They're one element identified at the heart of the increasing "snack-ification" of popular culture Wired magazine recently both celebrated and decried. Fueled by time-poverty, the miniaturization of technology, increasing competing options, and the personalization of media experiences, Wired suggested popular culture is being consumed in smaller, tastier, pithier morsels. This takes place, the magazine acknowledged, even as television and video game narratives become more multi-layered and complex, as DVDs are delivered with greater menus of content, and as the sheer degree of media available increases. The internet meme, often the swift and apparently faddish interest in a particular YouTube video – SNL's "Lazy Sunday" clip – would seem demonstrative of this tendency to consume cultural nuggets.

Lazy Sunday

The concept of the meme was coined by biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins as a way to discuss the growth and renewal of cultural systems. The concept was originally established to account for the way ideas progress across cultural spheres via replication. Like genes within a biological system, notions are sometimes copied improperly as they're replicated, mutating and morphing as they're passed along to produce new iterations that are sometimes far removed from the original source material. The meme has proven itself particularly popular as a way to consider cultural production, and particularly the propensity for cultural units to seemingly take on a life of their own and become more widespread fads.

In memetic fashion, the concept itself has mutated as it has spread; the notion of the internet meme has developed not necessarily to describe a mode of online cultural production based around re-purposing concepts and ideas, but instead as a shorthand and seemingly logical way to describe the sharing and spread of seemingly worthless but entertaining artifacts of popular culture. To identify the meme as a component of Wired's "snack-o-tainment" in some ways suggests lolcats, OK Go music videos, and All Your Base… mashups are essentially without cultural nutritional value. And to do so seems to misunderstand the form of the object for the purpose of its consumption. Teasing this out, separating the form of the object (the content of the cultural objects shared via memetic flows) from the purposes for which these objects are consumed (some of the uses memes serve) provides an insight into the way communities of interest are formed and maintained within convergence culture.

OK Go

While the lolcat phenomenon may indeed have spread like a fad, bubbling up apparently suddenly into the popular consciousness of the culture at large, the images themselves draw on a longer cultural history that traces its roots back at least to 1990s internet and video game culture. It is here we find the origins of the image macro, the particular practice of superimposing text over images lolcats build on.

But those who produce lolcat pictures represent their own brand of subculture, a community with particular criteria for entry and participation designed to distinguish its existence from the community at large. In the case of lolcats, these criteria include particular grammatical constructions – a sort of Engrish that mixes up verb-subject agreement, favors unconventional and somewhat phonetic spelling (such as "Hai" for "Hi"), and also certain aesthetic qualities – most lolcat images feature short phrases in large size sans serif fonts such as Impact. The ability to marshal these elements successfully produces a picture that signals one as a member of such a community. The peculiar grammar and specific misspellings spill over to forum postings, resulting in discussions that can seem unintelligible to an outsider not steeped in lolcat form.

Lolcats in Time

Self-reference, the invocation of phrases already used or the continuation of particular themes, strengthens participation within such a community. In the lolcat community, this especially involves producing pictures that continue established narratives, such as the search by a particularly sad walrus (a lolrus) for his missing bucket, or creating captions that construct conversations with images already posted.

These elements are seen as odd when the objects interact with broader culture, and they often become a source of fascination for a short period of time, fueling the memetic spread of such materials. The oddity of these features produces a particular set of linguistic barriers that enable the lolcat community to distinguish itself and patrol its boundaries. In some respects, communities such as these are akin to the expert communities we associate with education and authority. The lolcat community would seem in some ways similar to the science community, which likewise requires certain modes of linguistic performance in order to gain entry. Understanding the scientific method, and its requisite report style, comprises a barrier to entry perhaps as comparably complex as being able to decipher the Engrish of lolcat forums. Or perhaps not.

So too we can see the elements that comprise internet memes as similar communities, with their own codes for entry. This process is particularly important to members of subcultural communities; being able to decipher the elements positions one inside a special interest community. The note of regret expressed in the conclusion of Time magazine's profile, bespoke the sense of loss often felt when subcultural elements are stripped of their exclusive value and disseminated more widely – when everyone gets the joke it's a little less special.

It seems important to think of the elements that are picked up by memetic flows through such frameworks, as it reminds us that the very object mainstream culture is fascinated with for a moment might maintain a greater degree of cultural value within the community that produced it. Not everyone's lolcat is a potato chip.

Cultural artifacts that are passed along memetic flows, however, enable a different form of community making, one that requires not so much the production of any one artifact but the ability to read across many.

Forces such as globalization, migration, changing economic patterns, increasingly cheaper travel, and greater connectivity, have decentralized and dispersed communities, changing notions of what comprises a community along the way. We now maintain, and expect to maintain, communities in forms that are less physical than they were even thirty years ago. Traveling for education and employment especially has increased substantially as the period of time we expect to stay in one place has contracted. For generations from X onwards, the idea of laying roots in one particular place has diminished alongside the rise of first service-based and later "information", "knowledge", and "creative" based economies. These economic movements equipped people with easily translatable skills while migrating a significant proportion of the workforce to contract-based labor. In such an environment, movement and migration become a norm, at least for a period.

For those of us who live such lives, physical communities may be temporal, and longer-term ties to home, family and friends are often maintained via communication technologies. Social networking tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and MySpace provide particularly useful ways to manage participation in sometimes globally dispersed communities. In such a context, internet memes can have particular cultural value as a way to provide common cultural touchstones.
Finally, however, participating in the energy an internet meme can create, may provide an act of community formation that is tactical for the dispersed consumer. The buzz that emerges around a meme can provide short term status as an insider; participation in a community that comes without the obligations and investment required for long-term sustenance. This is the form of community we see emerging around one-shot curiosities, of which Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain" is a good, recent example.

Chocolate Rain

To marvel at this wonder of user-generated content, forwarding the video to friends, or even posting a response to YouTube, enables people to participate for a very short time in what might be a very rich community experience. Once the wave has crested, and everyone's tired of hearing his deep, dulcet tones, the community can disband without any sense of loss – it was never going to be permanent in the first place, it was formed in order to serve a purpose. Yet participating in this community still brought with it a sort of insider status; whistling the tune in an elevator might elicit a smile from a stranger who's similarly in the know.

Each of these modes of community formation provides an insight into the value seemingly weightless objects such as annotated pictures of kittens can have. These cultural artifacts are not without nutritional value despite their small size or perhaps the intense bursts of interest people pay them. Rather, they're devices for the formation of a range of communities that overlap and interact with the physical formations we participate in every day. They provide a sort of cultural shorthand allowing the production of communities of interest that capitalize on the fragmentation of the media landscape and the increasing mobility of the actors within it.

And far from being trivial, this cultural shorthand can be mobilized for more serious ends. Within days of Nancy Pelosi being announced as the US Speaker of the House, a lolcat-style image appeared with a picture of Pelosi being sworn in and the caption "I'M IN UR HOUSE IMPEACHING UR DOODZ". The image references both the lolcats and an earlier image macro meme, bringing them all together in an act of political commentary primed to ride the meme-wave the lolcats were on. Surely, there's nutritional value in that.

Pelosi picture

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