Getting a Masters Degree in lolcats memes will make you rich
Memes are often seen as the lowest form of culture for a good reason but now academics, advertisers and media people have started to seriously examine lolcats, Fails and the like—and they're making tons of money doing it.
The Independent has done a brilliant profile of clever LolCat fan Kate Miltner, a 29-year-old digital-strategist-turned-graduate-student at the London School of Economics. She's working on a masters degree studying internet memes, using focus groups to figure out why lolcats are so obnoxiously compelling.
"The 29-year-old has just handed in her dissertation to complete the requirements for her MSc from the university's Department of Media and Communications. The focus of her study? Internet memes, ie, often trite, viral images and films. More specifically, her favourite furry ones."
The article frames her story as a struggle by poor meme aficionados for legitimacy, and Miltner is happy to play along. "People think 'silly cat picture,'" Miltner told the paper.
But the idea that no one takes memes seriously is seriously outdated, if it was ever true. Memes make tons of money.
As Gawker points out the most well-worn example of this is the Cheezburger empire, which was built on aggregating lolcats and pictures of "Fail"; it spawned a bunch of popular books and raised $30 million in start-up funding in January. More recently, 4chan founder Christopher Poole raised more than $3 million for his new start-up, Canvas, an imageboard which lets people create and share dumb memes more easily than ever.
For more info on the story check out The Independent article and the Gawker report.
Here are some amazing Fails and below are some stupid cats just for you.
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- groups:
- WTF, Technology
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- tags:
- Viral Videos, FAIL, Cat Videos & Cat News, Memes, 1 more
