The internet perfectly lends itself to both genius and structured insanity, there is no arguing that (this site pretty much pays homage to that fact). Bruce Feirstein famously said that "the distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success". One would do well to point out that the definition of "success" in the realm of the internet has been blurred. Incredibly, fantastically, enormously blurred.
What constitutes success these days? Is it hits? Is it getting forwarded in e-mails around the world? How about appearing on Digg or Slashdot or any other various "news" aggregators? The answer to this question is frighteningly difficult to ascertain because the answer depends almost entirely on who you are asking.
Some people will tell you that the Lolcat is a success, and thus is genius not insanity. We didn't really think of them as either[1]...at least not until we saw one particular Lolcat recently and found it to be utterly ingenious, and subsequently hilarious. For those of you who don't know what a Lolcat is (to be honest, we were only vaguely familiar with them and had no idea they had a formal definition), Wikipedia explains them as such:
Lolcats, a compound of lol and cat, are photos of cats with humorous captions. They are a type of image macro, and are thus also referred to as cat macros. Lolcats are created for the purpose of sharing them with others on imageboards and other internet forums.
Lolcat images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, photoshopped for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or is a simple description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax featuring "strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar." These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin or baby talk. The text is frequently in the form of a snowclone parodying the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to internet slang. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of snowclones where nouns and verbs are replaced in a phrase. Some phrases have a known source while others seem to be specific to the lolcat form.
One common reoccurring phrase is: "im in yur X Yin' ur Z", a snowclone of "I'm in ur base killing ur doodz." [2]
Schrödinger's Lolcat. (flickr - dantekgeek)
[1] We would just like to say that we extol the virtues of both genius and insanity, but beyond these two classifications, one must also consider that something can still just be stupid.
[2]This line incidentally comes from an exchange between
Starcraft players that has become part of internet lore (see: "all your base are belong to us").
