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Aug 7, 2015 · How Cats Took Over the Internet tells the history of cats online, examining phenomena like Caturday, lolcats, cat videos, celebrity cats, and more to unearth why images and videos of the feline kind have transfixed a generation of web users. Touching on concepts like anthropomorphism, the aesthetics of cuteness, the Bored at Work Network, and the rise of user-generated content, this exhibit ...
Aug 7, 2015 · An article on Friday about the exhibition “How Cats Took Over the Internet,” at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, misstated the percentage of traffic about cats and dogs on ...
Aug 10, 2015 · How Cats Took Over the Internet, a new exhibit at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, traces the evolution of these memes from early chatrooms into sponsored cat celebrities. On its face, the ...
In 2015, an exhibition called "How Cats Took Over The Internet" opened at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. [21] The exhibition "looks at the history of how they rose to internet fame, and why people like them so much". [7] There is even a book entitled How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity: A Guide to Financial Freedom. [22]
- People — All Kinds of People — Really Care About this.
- We Like Watching Cat Videos Because We’Re All Secret Voyeurs.
- Cuteness Isn’T as Simple as We Think.
- When We Look at Cats, We’Re Really Looking at ourselves.
- Cats Are Culturally specific.
- Many Celebrity Cats Have Medical Conditions.
- The Internet Is A “Virtual Cat Park.”
- But in The End, Cats Actually Aren’T Any More Popular on The Internet Than Dogs.
When I visited the exhibit, it was full of everyone from 20-something bearded dudes to middle-aged couples to young girls with their grandmas. Eppink says one of his favorite moments was watching a dad discuss the effects of anthropomorphism with his young daughters. They were all engaging, and they were all getting it. The popularity of the exhibi...
The exhibit argues that in most videos, cats seem to be unaware of the camera, so we feel like we’re getting an authentic glimpse into their mysterious lives. It’s like watching surveillance videos: there’s something appealingly forbidden about it even when the subjects aren’t doing anything interesting. Dogs, on the other hand, generally acknowled...
“Cuteness gets really dark really fast,” Eppink says. “Cuteness is really fundamentally about a power differential. You can only find things cute where you’re more powerful than them.” You get to feel superior to this other creature and make fun of them without penalty. So next time you’re laughing at a fat cat struggling to fit in a small box, thi...
When we watch cat videos, we’re looking at something a human specifically decided to record and upload. The cat itself, obviously, had nothing to do with it. “Cats are sleeping or eating for the majority of their life and we don’t usually see videos or photos of that,” Eppink says. “We don’t find pleasure in that as much as we find pleasure in seei...
Cats are really popular in the U.S., Japan and western Europe, but other regions turn to different animals for their anthropomorphic needs. In Uganda, for example, the animals that most often pop up on the Internet are are chickens and goats — probably because Uganda is more of an agrarian society. And in the U.K., people are particularly drawn to ...
Grumpy Cat has feline dwarfism. Lil Bub has a bone disorder called osteopetrosis. Lazarus has a cleft palate. We find deformed creatures especially cute because they’re “particularly powerless and particularly in special need,” Eppink says. And in Grumpy Cat’s case, her disorder gave her a distinctive look — and her owners totally capitalized on th...
If dog owners want to meet up IRL with other dog owners, they can simply head to the nearest dog park. Cat owners, on the other hand, don’t have designated physical spaces to gather and talk about cat things. The Internet has filled this need and become something of a “virtual cat park,” a term coined by BuzzFeed’s Jack Shepherd in 2012. Cat owners...
Not when you look at the stats, at least. For example: cats make up 16% of views in YouTube’s Pets & Animals category, whereas dogs make up 23%. (And, for the record, the Pets & Animal Category accounts for less than 1% of total YouTube streams.) On Reddit, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” mentions of dogs and cats have remained pr...
- Samantha Grossman
Sep 21, 2015 · Loving a cat is a way in which a person can feel and express goodness and happiness, and cats express these things back to us in return. The cat video documents it all, in a form we share all over ...
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Aug 5, 2024 · In 2015, The New York Times reported that the popularity of cats on the Internet became the subject of a museum exhibition called How Cats Took Over The Internet. At the time, the exhibition was ...
