According to Miltner, "When it came to LOLCats, sharing and creating were often different means to the same end: making meaningful connections with others." At their core LOLCats weren't about those funny captions, the weird grammar, or the cute kitties, but people employed those qualities in service of that primary goal of human connection.

Miltner found that LOLCats consumers tended to fall into one of three groups. The groups had different cultures and attitudes, but for all three LOLCats provided a platform for communication and connection. The first group, which Miltner labeled "Cheezfrenz," was made up of LOLCats diehards. "They are invested LOLCat lovers whose interest in LOLCats generally stems from their affinity for cats," she explains. They tended to be involved in I Can Haz Cheezburger, the website of the LOLCat-loving community. Miltner found that for these women (and they were all women in her sample), the ICHC community appealed because it was, in the words of one "Cheezfrend" "a place to be safe and kind" for people who "want to be nice, want to be happy, want to give support, want to smile." Cheezfrenz recognized and bonded with each other (i.e. formed an in-group, in sociology-speak) by their correct use of LOLspeak (the grammar and spelling of LOLCats).

The second group, which Miltner calls the MemeGeeks (many of whom, she noted, make up ROFLCon's devoted base), uses different tactics for discerning in- and out-group boundaries, but the effect is the same: connection with your group. For the predominantly male MemeGeeks, they established their affiliation with the group by making LOLCats that refer to more obscure memes -- the more obscure, the better. They don't seek out LOLCats, but they play around with them on Reddit and Tumblr. The final group were the casual users, made up of people who are bored at work and who share LOLCats they find funny and cute. They were split pretty evenly male-female. For them, they emailed and Facebook-shared cats not with people they knew from the Internet but close friends and family -- it was a way of staying in touch and sharing a laugh during a day at the office.

While the specifics of Miltner's analysis may uniquely describe LOLCats, the argument she is making is bigger: Like space-invasion films of the mid-20th century or soap operas of more recent decades, the cultural phenomena of Internet memes reflect societal anxieties or desires, and that through studying these memes we can better understand what is going on in the collective mind of our culture. To ignore Internet memes, is to ignore the huge outpouring of modern folk culture that is occurring online, and -- taking the analysis one step further yet -- the ways that the Internet's particular participatory capacity is shaping that culture.

For LOLCats, that cultural reflection shows us a society that finds humor in anthropomorphized cats, and that builds connections by sharing the resulting laughs with other people. Other memes work in similar ways: People find something funny and they share it. It is the question of what we find funny that let's us see into our culture. And, unsurprisingly, this can have a darker side: Meme-humor, just like offline humor, sometimes reflects back at us the racism, sexism, and other prejudices that have deep roots in society.