Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. Most students whose favorite Internet haunts include Facebook and CollegeHumor know this especially. But how much is a picture worth that already has words written on it?

According to my roommates, not very much. In my many surfs through the ‘net I have picked up hundreds of funny images that some other online user has edited with his/her limited photoshop skills to add some fitting text. When I posted one of these such pictures on my door, my roommates all confessed to me that they didn’t understand the joke at all. In fact, they didn’t find any part of the picture amusing in the least. This of course made me quite sad, and looking at the picture again I realized that there was so much going on in it that ‘normal’ people wouldn’t understand. Therefore, on behalf of my roommates, I present to you the picture in question as well as an explanation of why it is lulz.

An image like this is known as an “image macro”. Wikipedia, (NSFW&g Encyclopedia Dramatica and a number of other sites claim the origin of this term comes from the SomethingAwful forums where pre-designated text, known as a macro, could be typed that would result in an image being displayed. It soon became common practice in forums and image-hosting sites all over the Internet to post amusing images, most commonly of their pets with all too human-like expressions on their faces, and for other users to pick these images up and edit them with some sort of caption.

The caption written on the image usually refers to some pre-existing concept or phenomenon on the Internet, also known as a meme. A meme, in short, is sort of like an inside joke for the Internet. Basically when one image, event, person or thing becomes really popular, more and more people start spreading knowledge about this item to one another to the point that its history or meaning no longer needs to be explained, and this new meme can be brought up in any situation and people will understand the meaning and humor. In the photo above, there are a number of memes at play here:

1.) Cats. Cats are probably the biggest meme on the Internet to date. It would take me another 5 pages worth of blogging to explain the entire reason why this is, but all you need to know is that cats make crazy expressions and do silly things, and cat owners supply the Internet at large with enough photos of their beloved Fluffy for everyone to add macro-captions on a hundred times over. Some famous cat memes include Limecat, Longcat, Ceilingcat, Monorailcat, and the Treachery Afoot cats.

2.) “Moar”. The Internet is full of young, hyperactive, undereducated and unskilled typists who, while already are incapable of correctly spelling half the words in the English language, manage to brutally mangle up the other half for not knowing how to navigate a keyboard. Thus, misspelling in of itself is a popular meme, and certain misspellings become so essential in forum posts that using the correct spelling will actually get you laughed at. One such word is the misspelling of the word ‘more’, “moar”. Moar has gained its popularity in many forums when one user posts something interesting or desirable to look at (usually links to porn, unsurprisingly) and everyone who responds after demands ‘moar!’

3.) CAPSLOCK. A common expression meme on the Internet is “CAPSLOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL”. This comes from mocking Internet users who try to draw attention to themselves or express their anger by using capslock. Image macros commonly use capslock in their captions to draw on the hilarity and ridiculousness that capslock entails.

4.) Internets. If you go into a web forum and talk about the ‘Internet’, you will usually be corrected that it is really the Internets. This meme comes from the ever eloquent George Bush who said, during the Bush-Kerry debates, “I hear there’s rumors on the, uh…Internets!” Since then, frequenters of the Internet will insist that there is more than one Internet, and that they are all connected by “a series of tubes”.

So what is this image macro saying? I posted this image on my door to poke fun at my Internet addiction while at the same time using many of the very ideas and expressions that only Internet addicts understand to highlight the extent of that addiction. Is an image macro worth a thousand words? I guess not. But is it worth one blog post? I’ll let you decide.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Internet culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.