Are LOLCats Making Us Smart?     What could possibly be said of
LOLCats that is of any consequence at all? After all, LOLCats
are nothing but pictures of cats with silly captions that defy
conventional rules of spelling and grammar. What do they matter?
They don't. Or at least, the content -- the "what" -- of LOLCats
doesn't much matter. But the why of LOLCats has proved to be
rich terrain for Kate Miltner who received her Master's Degree
from the London School of Economics for her dissertation on the
appeal of LOLCats (pdf) and spoke at ROFLCon -- a conference
devoted to Internet memes and the mini-celebrities that have
emerged -- on a panel called "Adventures in Aca-meme-ia" this
past weekend at MIT. (A video by my colleague Kasia Cieplak-Mayr
von Baldegg, "Memes Are People Too," explores the events of
ROFLCon in greater detail.)  Why, Miltner asks, have these cat
pictures become the cultural phenomenon that they are?
"LOLCats," she writes, "have spawned two best-selling books, a
Bible translation, an art