So I was poking around my computer earlier today and I happened to notice that it was 10:00 AM Central time, exactly the time that Barack Obama was planning to announce his plans for pursuing the Presidency.

I made my way over to his site and saw that the speech was being streamed live, so I watched it. And I’m a little uncertain about what I’ve seen.

Obama has a wonderful vision for our future–the kind of vision that people will be willing to give their votes for. To create a better tomorrow usually involves some amount of getting to work today, and politics aside, Obama is the kind of leader that has the ability to inspire our nation to work together to achieve unarguably great things. (By unarguably I’m referring to goals that people on both ends of the spectrum have, like ending poverty or hunger, rather than partisan-driven goals).

I’m an English major, so one of my main tasks at school these past few years has been to study rhetoric. It was clear for me listening to this speech that Obama is saying all the right things, in a way that rings more true than any politician I’ve heard before. His communication with us is similar to that of the speeches of MLK Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, and given the political climate lately, it’s refreshing to hear. True political leaders unite the people they lead, and it seems that Barack will be able to motivate us to work toward achieving common goals more than any other Democratic candadite.

The greatest sign of this, for me, was in some of the rhetoric that he chose to use in describing how we will move forward. Take these few sentences:

“I know there are those who don’t believe we can do all these things. I understand the skepticism. After all, every four years, candidates from both parties make similar promises, and I expect this year will be no different. All of us running for president will travel around the country offering ten-point plans and making grand speeches; all of us will trumpet those qualities we believe make us uniquely qualified to lead the country. But too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in, and people turn away, disappointed as before, left to struggle on their own.

That is why this campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us - it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice - to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.”

In this statement he has taken three incredibly powerful steps: he has shined a light onto a failing that candidates usually keep in the dark once they’ve reached office. He has implicitly promised to not follow in their footsteps. But most importantly, he has shifted the responsibility–and the reward– onto us, the American people, where it belongs. (After all, no matter how disillusioned I am with our current President, I cannot deny that he is the man who our nation chose to lead us–twice).

There’s something about Obama’s words that move me really deeply, in a way that I’ve never encountered in listening to any other politician. Sure, Obama could be lying. He could be a manipulative hack; our nation has been burned by far too many aspiring politicians for us to be capable of implicitly trusting one. But there’s something about Obama’s message that he is in this race “not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation,” that just rings true to me.

People will cite Obama’s lack of experience as a reason that he should not be considered as a presidential candidate. This is a fair point, and part of me agrees with it. But given the climate in Washington lately, I wonder what more “experience” in Washington would really mean. If we’re working with a clearly broken and ineffective Congress, do we want to favor leaders who are more firmly entrenched in the corrupted system? Do we want leaders who are more adept at settling for what is?

There is a newness and a freshness to Obama’s passion that more “experience” may slowly drain away, after he has a few more years of being subjected to lobbyists and special interest groups. If we as a nation are committed to changing our government, maybe we need someone who hasn’t adapted to Washington. Maybe the time for Obama is now.

If you ever dare to venture away from the safe, culturally-understandable confines of Facebook and take a look into the world of online drama, I promise you will be grateful for the big, steaming pile of lulz available to you at the click of a button almost every day.

What is lulz? Lulz of course comes from the acronym lol, meaning “laugh out loud”. While lol is usually read as “ell-oh-ell”, pronounced as a word you get “lawl” or “lul”. On the Internet, where everything is a misspelled, bastardization of the English language, the pluralization of this term becomes lulz.

Lulz is most commonly used in the expression “I did it for the lulz”. This usually refers to deliberate trolling behavior intended to harass Internet users for the amusement of others. World of Warcraft once became Internet-known for this, when a man and a woman fell in love on the game, and after many quests and creating a guild together the man asked the woman to marry him. She agreed, but the night before she planned to fly out to see him in real life for the first time, she confessed to him that she was really a man, and their entire relationship was a sham. Devastated, the man asked why someone would do something so terrible as this, and his answer was only “I did it for the lulz”.*

Lulz isn’t limited to deceitful acts of trolling. Lulz can commonly be found all over the Internet, most commonly on Anime/Furry art forums or in the blogs of pre-pubescent ‘emo’ girls. Drama_Awesome, a livejournal community, posts weekly (if not daily) updates regarding the various drama to be found on the ‘net and invites its members to partake in the lulz. Most of the drama presented in this community comes from forum members of various sites who begin a debate about whatever but later divulge into a trainwreck of insults, correcting each others’ typos and grammatical errors and accusing each other of the same hypocrisy they practice in their posting (also referred to as saying “NO U”, but this and other expressions will be discussed in a later blog). As such incidents suggest, lulz is commonly found among Internet users who overextend what limited knowledge they have and show themselves for the ignorant lulz-factories they are.

Lulz is also not limited to events on the Internet. For example, the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith has generated intense amount of lulz from a variety of sites, many pulling up as many unflattering pictures of her as possible and speculating over the many reasons, real or otherwise, why she might have died. However, it should be noted that as an Internet concept, lulz can only be used and discussed on the Internet. Also, lulz that occurs on the Internet is always greater than lulz that happens in real life. Even Micheal Richard’s tirrade on “n****rs” did not generate the amount of online lulz that many an Internet phenomenon has. How Internet phenomenons develop and how they generate lulz will also be discussed in a later blog, so fear not if you are a bit confused.

Is lulz insenstive? Mean? Perhaps. What people find funny in real life is often filtered through a veil of what society deems socially acceptable or not. Even among your group of close friends, there are often some things you just don’t joke about for the fear or courtesy of offending someone over something personal. But on the Internet, other than what rules a webmaster or server host lays down for a particular site, its users are free to discuss whatever they want and joke about whatever they want. Perhaps it is for this exact reason that users online will push the limits of humor and overstep any social boundaries, often by using racist and sexist jokes in the most inappropriate situations. On the Internet, where there is almost always a safe and non-visual distance between the harmer and the one harmed, lulzing over every bit of harsh (yet arguably funny) information is more acceptible. Thus, lulz was born on the Internet, and on the Internet it shall remain.

People often ask me why I deleted my Facebook account and yet manage to spend hours on end surfing the ‘net and typing away. I’m doing it for the lulz. This is probably difficult if not impossible for some of you, who only get your lulz from the likes of Facebook and CollegeHumor, to understand, but my hope with my portion of this blog is to enlighten the campus at large about the inner goings-on of the Internet and the many subcultures that form as a result. My hope is to share all the lulz the Internet has to offer so that one day you’ll be doing it for the lulz too.

Stay tuned for my next post when I’ll be discussing memes.

*This, and much of the other information on lulz presented in this article, was found on the Internet culture documentation site (warning: not safe for work) EncyclopediaDramatica.com. Information on this site is not always permanent, as the site is a wiki open for any editing.