Why is the internet so obsessed with pictures of cats and is there more to them than meets the eye?
That sentence probably puts you in one of two camps: someone who thinks the BBC’s standards have reached an all time low, or an aficionado of one of the most virally pervasive of all internet memes, the lolcat.
For the uninitiated, lolcats are the near-numberless offspring of a venerable class of object: the “image macro”, in which text is superimposed on to a photograph. Born in the mid-2000s, “laugh-out-loud-cats” – as nobody would ever dream of spelling them out – pair cute animal images with comically-misspelt captions.
This may seem distinctly limited grounds for amusement. But type “lolcat” into Google and you’ll turn up not only six-million-plus pictures, but initiatives ranging from scholarly studies to the frankly bewildering “lolcat bible translation project”, which is steadily converting the entire holy book into “lolspeak” (Genesis 1:1 – “Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs...”)
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120222-cats-memes-and-internet-schemes
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