Posts tagged lolcats

“As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible. What amateurs do is so, well, unprofessional — lolcats as a kind of low-grade substitute for the Cartoon Network. But what if, all this time, providing professional content isn’t the only job we’ve been hiring media to do? What if we’ve also been hiring it to make us feel connected, engaged, or just less lonely? What if we’ve always wanted to produce as well as consume, but no one offered us that opportunity?

Once you accept the idea that we actually like making and sharing things, however dopey in content or poor in execution, and that making one another laugh is a different kind of activity from being made to laugh by people paid to make us laugh, then in some ways the Cartoon Network is a low-grade substitute for lolcats.”

- Clay Shirky; Cognitive Surplus