I love seeing academic stuff tossed at online phenomena — like this sort of sociological/linguistic analysis of lolcats via I Can Has Cheezburger?
Check out this chart:
Ha! Harbls in a chart!
The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.
It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information. Strunk and White would probably be appalled, but then again, maybe not.
Heh. Nice to see a bit of work that manages to analyze something goofy without mocking it.
(The post title refers to this image)
Timely: I read this: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/05/08/dystruktshun_of.html earlier this morning.
Though really, one cannot express anthropological theory any more ideally than via lolcats. 🙂
Indeed! I am reminded of the James Nicoll quote:
The SMSization of English is just part of the fun — along with Engrish, kitteh, and other variants. The English used in India is a fun one too, IMO.