My wife and I watched the movie Juno last night, and I highly recommend it for your own viewing. But this isn't a review of the movie, what sparked today's essay is how (depressingly) little of its dialogue I didn't understand. This was because of the quick cultural references spoken by the teenagers portrayed in the movie. I guess I am getting to that generation where words like cool and hep cat are no longer part of the lexicon. I know, this isn't a news flash.

It occurred to me that years from now we will watch this movie and need on-screen annotations to explain what they are talking about.

But the movie is a static, finished entity. What is more interesting to watch is how pop culture references are being incorporated into various online media, and how they are passed around, consumed, and transformed as part of the media itself. As the online world becomes more a fixture in our lives, we are seeing a much more complex evolution. It isn't just the insertion of a bunch of slang words, but an almost complete encoding or translation of pop culture itself. Witness leet-speak, the gamer lingo that results from substituting numbers for letters that luckily (for me, at least) peaked a few years ago. The more cynical of us could look upon leet as just a substitution cipher, but it really is more than that, embodying a way of life and world view. (The best example is the PurePwnage.com videos.)