Lolcats: Gateway Drug

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry complicates a recent post by Douthat:

What Shirky says, I think — or at least what I think — is that the MySpace and lolcats sphere of the internet is useful not necessarily (or not only) in itself but as a gateway drugto a culture of consuming and producing content. Content that, likecontent through all of human history, will be 99% dreck and 1% genius,the only difference between now and the 19th (or 9th) century beingthat most of the dreck (though certainly not all...