Im in ur blog, writin bout teh psychologiez

As my department’s resident crazy cat lady, it’s no surprise that I take great joy in lolcats. I had seen a few, but it was this LiveJournal post in February that opened my eyes to just how many kitty macros there were out there. I spent a good three days reading the 50 pages of comments that followed, which resulted in 1) wasting a lot of time, and 2) me laughing maniacally alone in my office.

Recently, good ol’ Boing Boing posted a link to Anil Dash’s blog post in which he mused about the phenomenon of “kitty pidgin”, or the language lolcats “speak”. Now, I’m not going to get into the psychology of linguistics, as I’m far from an expert in that subject. But it made me wonder about the psychological aspects of the popularity of lolcats. However, I’ve been beaten to the punch by several people. Since his original post, Anil has addressed the topic of closure in comics and subsequently, lolcats. Go read that and then come back here.

So I never thought about it before, but the “invisible object” type of lolcat is a great illustration of the Gestalt perception principle of closure. Our minds fill in the blanks such that we can easily imagine whatever the cat is supposed to be interacting with. And that’s pretty funny.

Now I have a viable excuse to scour I Can Has Cheezburger? every day. I’m just looking for good examples to show in class!