300,000 hits for “I can haz”?

wet-madI don’t know what got into me, exactly, but on a whim, I entered “I can haz” into a Google search. I guess I was becoming aware how often the phrase appears as I surf around. I wondered how pervasive it had become, how much cultural penetration it had achieved. Google came up with almost 300,000 references to the phrase, a statistic that gave me pause. (Check it now. Maybe the total has gone up since the date of this post.)

This “cultural penetration” thing is interesting, though, and we’ve all experienced the phenomenon, usually as the uncomfortable feeling that comes from being with someone who is just picking up on something that we have become tired of ourselves. It’s like you got penetrated a long time ago, but this person has just now gotten nailed. What explains that? Perhaps he was hiding in some cultural backwater? Perhaps he has a life?

But ah, the fads: They begin; they gain currency; they end. But not really, huh? Maybe they just keep penetrating like the old television broadcasts of I Love Lucy, which are some 57 light years out in space now. Bless her, Lucy has been hurtling through the galaxy at the speed of light as long as I have been alive. Some far-off alien is just now saying, “So turn off the conveyor belt already!”

The big hit getter on the search, of course, is Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures – I Can Has Cheezburger?, which allows mere mortals such as you and me to create art in the form of pictures of cats embellished with misspelled captions. These pictures, if viewed with just the right amount of post-modern hipster cultural acumen, should cause one to LOL, and if I have to parse that one for you, well….

The site’s Terms of Use are remarkably free of misspellings, however. Someone in a Brooks Brothers suit is actually taking all this seriously.

Another plum domain from the search, I CAN HAZ dot COM, doesn’t seem to be as “lawyered up,” but hey, they are only providing a service for creating short URLs; they are not creating an empire as the Lolcats people are.

But back to fads. New York Magazine is pretty preoccupied with fads, and they are good at discussing them without getting all starry eyed on the one hand, or insulting anyone who happens to be into them on the other. More importantly, they are good at staying ahead of the various pop-cultural trends in a place that generates many of our country’s fads.

The magazine has two fad-centric features that show what I mean. There is The Approval Matrix, which places current cultural and political events on dual continua between highbrow and lowbrow, and between brilliant and despicable. It can be interesting, since it tends to cut through our tendency to pay attention to things primarily on the basis of their currency; it does so by considering also the intrinsic value of these events and the people behind them. Another feature, however, The Undulating Curve, traces fads through various stages from “pre-buzz” to “saturation point.” Interestingly, though, in this graphic, the curve continues, mentioning items that have somehow recovered currency after having been relegated to “ho-hum” status. Rather than penetrating the culture in straight lines, these special fads have penetrated the culture in arcs that bring them back around to us.

Ever thought of starting a fad? With apologies to Robert Frost, one could do worse than be the creator of fads, especially the kind that gain currency because they have some lasting value outside of their ability to show how “with it” we are.

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