Thanks to David McRaney for his submission. You can visit his site, Zero Sum Mind, here.

I keep sane by having a kaleidescope of friends who make sense of reality in drastically differing ways, often in total opposition to each other.

If you spend/have spent as much time as I do/have online, you begin to sense some of the latent functions of this medium. The Internet (yes, it is capitalized according to the Associated Press Stylebook) is the true melting pot, the true mixing bowl of subcultures and deviance. Out of it have emerged new
cultures.

Sure, people self-segregate, but for people like myself this just makes it easier to buzz from flower to flower. I love to visit the Furries and the Kirk/Spock gay erotic art groups, the Bible thumpers and the body modifiers.

Sociologists must go through a lot of pants when they cruise the digital realm because subcultures are constantly spawning subcultures to the point there is a sort of electronic gravy made from all these people meeting online and simmering in the juices of screen-to-screen communication.

Leetspeak and macros are two of … (click to read the rest)… my favorite aspects of Internet-specific subcultures.

Like most Web-based subcultures, shared aspects arise in places where people interact the most directly - forums, social networking websites, chatrooms and Web 2.0 incarnations.

Strangely enough, though American culture is far less literate than in previous decades, we read all day long and communicate through written language possibly more than ever so in history. Words are the currency of text messaging, emails, blogs and websites. This may or may not be a good thing, considering how our communications within these arenas are so economical and utilitarian. The long-form, eloquent email is a rare bird in the cyberjungle.

Still, a fusion of sorts between learned, direct language and rapid, practical digital missives takes place with Leetspeak and macros. Both relay a great deal of information in a small burst of code. Each depends on the receiver of the information having working knowledge of the culture and its references. In a sense, these serve as argots, and help identify both sides of the information transfer as belonging to the subculture where they appear. The in-joke is part of the communication. The separation of ingroup and outgroup helps drive the rapid evolution of both leetspeak and macros.

Although leetspeak has been around for a while, it has mutated into several formats, thus creating a continuum of Internet prose. At its most basic, leetspeak is pure written language slang originally used to get ideas across faster than spelling out commonly used terms like, “away from keyboard,” which became AFK. Over time, usage of the acronym allowed for descriptive expressions like “He’s gone AFK.”

At the high-end, elitist leetspeak features letters and numbers mixed together and references to computer hacking skills are applied to everyday life; at the low end, cute terms used in text messaging and MySpace are filled mainly with acronyms for common phrases.

High-End Example: p43ar my l337 sk11lz0rz!!!1!!1
Translation: You should be fearful of my powerful computer hacking abilities.
Fear = p43ar; elite = l337; skill = sk11lz0rz.

Notice also the exclamation points include intentional errors simulating the furious smashing of the 1 key while holding shift to get the ! symbol. Someone really going crazy on the !!!!! often misses a shift press in there somewhere. Other words commonly used like “pwnd” follow the same architecture. If you defeated someone at a video game, you might exclaim the slang term, “owned!” This word has its own evolution, but once it enters into the leetspeak lexicon, it gets a new life. People rapidly typing “owned” during online game play commonly missed the o on the keyboard and typed “pwned” instead. Eventually, this became the preferred spelling along with “pwnd.” Now, there are several derivatives of the word including the state of defeat as delivered by the utterer of, “Pwnage.”

In the beginning, the whole phrase depends on your understanding of not just the language, but the etymology’s of its terms and symbols. After repeated uses, the etymology no longer matters, just as it doesn’t in normal, common English. The difference with leetspeak is how it evolves at a rapid pace so it may remain fresh and full of in-jokes and references. There is a non-directed, systemic quality to leetspeak encouraging people to play with it, experiment and add. With leetspeak, we have finally created a written language where the rules of slang are dominant.

If you have ever heard someone say “l-o-l,” enunciating each letter one at a time, you have heard the the pitter patter of the next steps in human language and this article. People go so far as say the three letters as a word,”Lol,” or “Lawl.”

Leetspeak hinges on it being read and not spoken. But, as people spend more time online, and spend more time with others who also spend time online, it becomes acceptable to maintain in group status by using leetspeak in spoken form. Thus, I’ve heard people say (phonetically) “pawnage,” “powned,” “pawned,” “p-owned,” and so on.

Ok, thanks for keeping up. Here comes the kicker.

This has a cyclical quality as well. Eventually, these spoken versions of leetspeak are reintroduced into the written language of the Internet. Often, it goes something like this:

Someone uses lol, which turns into the spoken “l-o-l,” which then becomes “lol” but sounds like “lawl,” and at some point someone in a forum thread, in response to something funny, puts up an image of Lal, the name of Data’s daughter from a single, obscure “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode. It’s a big inside joke on several levels, and the creator gets golf claps for pulling together all these references into one simple understatement. Everyone who gets it belongs in the ingroup, and the behavioral cycle is encouraged and repeated.

The image macro is born out of this cycle.

Forums typically put new posts underneath older ones. So, a direct response to someone’s rant about the coming police state in America may be immediately followed by an image of Captain America crying. Everyone gets the reference and the idea. This is a very high-level, metacommunication format.

Consider how difficult is its for computers to identify faces. Consider how confirmation keys are now images so computers can’t understand what is being communicated. Consider the new confirmation keys where a series of images are displayed and the user must pick which one of these is not like the other. Computers have a terrible time with this kind of task.

Communication through images is a powerful way to pass complex ideas back and forth. You see Captain America crying, and you understand a concept that would take several paragraphs of exposition.

So, image macros have really blossomed online in the last few years. Many of them take a slant on an existing meme circulating across the Internet. Of course, most of them are also designed to make you laugh along with solidifying in group status and also getting a point across.

For instance:

<– Someone is being overly dramatic.

Someone has posted something you would like to see more of. –>

<– Someone is being a dick.

These image macros influence new written leetspeak, which in turn influences new spoken leetpeak and new macros. All of this churns at a rapid pace and evolves with each new generation. Eventually, something like the lolcats comes along and splinters the whole language schema into a new branch where all new in jokes, references and acceptable formats are born.

Lolcats are image macros featuring cats captioned with a specific form of language, one with no definitive label as of yet. I’ve seen it referred to as Kittahh and Kitteh before, but nothing has stuck. A clinical term, kitty pidgin, has also been coined because there seems to be some sort of order to the way sentences are constructed. The language may also derive from Meowchat, an IRC group who used to use similar diction when pretending to be cats online.

The phrase is usually white text with a solid black outline, and the grammar is consistently awful, as if the cat was trying to speak English but just couldn’t get the conjugation right. Some have suggested these macros were inspired by the old cat inspirational poster, “Hang in there.” Others suggest these simply fall into place with a long history of using anthropomorphized animals to get our kicks. These macros are used like any other, but for some reason, these have struck a chord and are mutating at an alarming rate. Now, there are several subgenres of Lolcats including:

Invisible

Harbls

Hai

I eated

I has…

I’m in ur…

In addition to the subgenres, new offshoots of the Lolcats adhering to the same grammar rules are spawning:

Walrus (Lolrus) w/bucket

Lolgerbil/hamster

Lolgays

Loltrek

Lolgeek

Each subgenere and offshoot influences the others laterally, and the in jokes and references generated by the lolcats appear across the whole universe of macros. Some seem to have storylines. Some are direct responses to previous macro postings. For example, an invisible sandwich might soon be followed by a visible one.

Perhaps this chart will help to make sense of this.

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.

After all, a single image of a cat being struck by the sudden realization of how all this connects is the ultimate in clean, succinct and direct dialog.