and x gets the square

Maybe another question to consider is what [ROFL/meme culture] means — to consider the Web not in terms of how it might affect who we become but rather in terms of how it reflects who we are. ROFL, after all, is not a seductive theory about what enlightened things democratized culture may one day produce; it is a pervasive fact on the ground. This is how sizable chunks of our cognitive resources are actually being deployed, so it’s worth trying to figure out why that is, what functions this stuff serves and how it differs from or falls in line with more familiar forms of entertainment.

…The more traditional pundits and gurus who talk about the Internet often seem to want to draw strict boundaries between old mass-media culture and the more egalitarian forms taking shape online — and between Internet life and life in the physical world. But I wonder if the trick that converts a bus fight into hilarious entertainment for millions isn’t revealing such boundaries as false. Sometimes the pointless-seeming jokes that spring from the Web seem to be calling a bluff and showing a truth: This is what egalitarian cultural production really looks like, this is what having unbounded spaces really entails, this is what anybody-can-be-famous means, this is how the hunger for “moar” gets sated, this is what’s burbling in the hive mind’s id. But the real point is that to pretend otherwise isn’t denying the Internet — it’s denying reality. In some cases, then, maybe the payoff of ROFL isn’t just the pleasure of laughter, though that surely happens. Trickster expression, intentional or otherwise, doesn’t propose a solution but jolts you to confront some question that you might prefer to have avoided. Like what, exactly, am I laughing at?

“A smart business plan is to take a product and develop it into a brand,” says Mr. Murtha, now chief executive of the teddy bear company Gund, a division of Enesco LLC in Itasca, Ill. He recommends that Silly Bandz make more “silly” things to avoid being a one-hit wonder.

Mr. Croak is already moving in that direction, by selling Silly Necklaces and Silly Buttons.

Still, through the decades plenty of toys developed by small companies—think Pet Rocks and Pogs—became all the rage but failed to maintain long-term appeal. Kids, who determine the fate of such products, can be fickle consumers.

“In six months, a child’s view of life has changed dramatically,” says Wendy Liebmann, chief executive of WSL Marketing Inc. in New York, which conducts research on retail strategy. “For a child to be absorbed in something, that means that you need to constantly reinvent it.”