This stream of bite-size distractions is just the sort of thing that Nicholas Carr, in his book “The Shallows,” maintains is undermining serious and sustained thought. In another recent book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” Jaron Lanier, the technology pioneer and writer, pointedly laments the “vapid video pranks” and “lightweight mashups” that mark what he argues is the disappointing lack of progress in the Web 2.0 era, part of a devolution into a culture of schlock and juvenilia, where recycling mass-media artifacts trumps true individual originality.

But maybe juvenilia has its purpose. “There’s something excellent about freeing the 10-year-old boy in all of us,” says Theresa Senft, a University of East London lecturer, who is writing a book about Internet microcelebrity. Senft’s work deals seriously with the politics and power dynamics of online identity and representation — and she loves ROFL without apologies. “It’s the doofus, the kid who dances in the rain and makes 10,000 fart jokes and laughs at every single one,” she says. “It’s very joyful.” People have a hard time, she added, acknowledging the irrational laughter that the body produces even when the mind isn’t sure why. “How come we can’t think of this stuff as ‘O.K., it’s stupid — but it’s also beautiful in some way’?” she asks. “It’s beautiful to be in the middle of 5,000 e-mails and stressing about your taxes and having someone send you an idiotic video — and just laugh.”

The closing panel discussion at ROFLCon II was “Mainstreaming the Web,” and it included Ben Huh, the Lolcat entrepreneur; Christopher Poole, the 4Chan founder; and Kenyatta Cheese of Know Your Meme, among others. The discussion was surprisingly earnest. (And despite some rumors about trouble­makers from /b/ who were planning to disrupt things, it was almost disappointingly civilized.) There was musing about whether memes signify a subculture and, if so, whether that could last; speculation about the nature of the meme consumer that would have fit in easily at a more traditional Web confab; and audience feedback making the inevitable suggestion that mainstream attention is ruining awesome meme making. Mostly there was consensus. Cheese said that Know Your Meme was founded in part because more mainstream sources (he mentioned Wikipedia) weren’t documenting Internet memes, despite the fact that ROFL material is “fast becoming our common language.”

Earlier, on an afternoon when I was supposed to be calling up media scholars and technology experts to get their take on this fast-growing form of culture, I instead sought a little entertainment online. I wasn’t consciously seeking out the happy distractions of ROFL material, but after the usual flitting around, I paused on a post on HipsterRunoff.com, titled “Keut Hipster Girl Watches White Guy Beat Up Black Guy on Public Bus.” HipsterRunoff frequently comments on Web culture in the texting-speak patois of an idiot-savant “author” named Carles. It can be read as nihilistic, searingly critical or just sort of ROFL. In any case, this post was about a recent “youtubable fight” on a bus in Oakland, in which “an old white guy wearing a fanny pack” pummels a younger black man. “The fight seems racially motivated,” Carles deadpanned, adding: “A cute lil hipster girl watches on, trying to pay attention to her surroundings, but more importantly, she is enjoying the music on her large headphones. Her purple American Apparel outfit and Converse lowtops clash violently with the racial tensions on the bus.” The video itself was as described — and fairly depressing.

But it was clearly getting sucked into the ROFL vortex. The anonymous users of 4Chan’s /b/ forum renamed the older white guy “Epic Beard Man.” They also created a nickname for the indifferent-seeming young woman in the headphones, “Amber Lamps,” inspired by the younger black man’s slurred request for an ambulance. A slew of image macros incorporated these figures and phrases from the clip into visual jokes using every conceivable ROFL trope, collected on Know Your Meme and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Many of the jokes turned on racist language, and the 75,000-plus comments posted to the original YouTube video (which soon had more than four million views) were a carnival of coarseness. The video was linked from BuzzFeed, and the crowd classified it as LOL and OMG. Somebody made a video of Hitler reacting to the incident. Somebody else created an animated version and someone started a site, Epicbeardmanfacts.com. Traditional media sources and “citizen journalists” interviewed both men, and videos of those conversations circulated and became part of the iterations online. The Huffington Post ran an item titled “Why ‘Epic Beard Man’ Is the Fastest Growing Public Fight Meme Ever.”

Awesome? Or appalling? Either way, the Epic Beard Man meme seemed like a good example of one last thing worth considering about “Internet culture.” Among the academics I eventually called was Gabriella Coleman, the N.Y.U. professor. Her research into hacker identities stretches back to the era of 1970s “phreakers” who figured out how to manipulate the phone system and continues through the contemporary trolls who rain grief on Web users they find stupid or bothersome or simply easy to pick on. A mantra in the latter group is that they do it all “for the lulz,” meaning for the LOLs, just because they can. The “for the lulz” attitude can be more broadly thought of as a rationale for the idea that everything is worth making fun of, nothing should be taken seriously, not even a guy getting punched in the face until he bleeds.

Coleman has a particular interest in the different and interlocking ethical codes of the groups she studies. One of the variations she has explored is the “informational trickster,” a formulation that relies in part on the writer Lewis Hyde’s exploration of creative troublemaking figures in the folklore and mythology of multiple cultures in his book, “Trickster Makes This World.” The trickster figures that Hyde writes about break rules, ignore mores and commit prankish acts of mayhem or mischief for selfish reasons. Sometimes the trickster goes too far and pays a price; sometimes the trickster reveals the hypocrisy of the game he just cheated. But invariably, the actions of tricksters bridge two previously divergent worlds, revealing each to the other and changing their relationship permanently.

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?