Popular part of Internet culture
Images and videos of domestic cats make up some of the most viewed content on the World Wide Web. ThoughtCatalog has described cats as the "unofficial mascot of the Internet".
The subject has attracted the attention of various scholars and critics, who have analysed why this subject has reached iconic status. Although it may be considered frivolous, cat-related Internet content contributes to how people interact with media and culture. Some argue that there is a depth and complexity to this seemingly simple content, with a suggestion that the positive psychological effects that pets have on their owners also hold true for cat images viewed online.
Research has suggested that viewing online cat media is related to positive emotions, and that it even may work as a form of digital therapy or stress relief for some users. Some elements of research also shows that feelings of guilt when postponing tasks can be reduced by viewing cat content.
Some individual cats, such as Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, have achieved popularity online because of their unusual appearances and funny cat videos.
History.
Humans have a longstanding relationship with cats, and the animals have often been a subject of short films, including the early silent movies "Boxing Cats" (1894) and "The Sick Kitten" (1903). Harry Pointer (1822–1889) has been cited as the "progenitor of the shameless cat picture". Cats have been shared via email since the Internet's rise to prominence in the 1990s. The first cat video on YouTube was uploaded in 2005 by YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, who posted a video of his cat called "Pajamas and Nick Drake". The following year, "Puppy vs Cat" became the first viral cat video; uploaded by a user called Sanchey (a.k.a. Michael Wienzek); as of 2015[ [update]] it had over 16 million views on YouTube. In a Mashable article that explored the history of cat media on the Internet, the oldest entry was an ASCII art cat that originated on 2channel, and was a pictorial representation of the phrase "Please go away." The oldest continuously operating cat website is sophie.net, which launched in October 1999 and is still operating.
"The New York Times" described cat images as "that essential building block of the Internet". In addition, 2,594,329 cat images had been manually annotated in flickr.com by users. An interesting phenomenon is that many photograph owners tag their house cats as "tiger".
Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami started the website I Can Haz Cheezburger in 2007, where they shared funny pictures of cats. This site allowed users to create LOLcat memes by placing writing on top of pictures of their cats. This site now has more than 100 million views per month and has "created a whole new form of internet speak". In 2009, the humour site Urlesque deemed September 9 "A Day Without Cats Online", and had over 40 blogs and websites agree to "[ban] cats from their pages for at least 24 hours". As of 2015[ [update]], there are over 2 million cat videos on YouTube alone, and cats are one of the most searched keywords on the Internet. CNN estimated that in 2015 there could be around 6.5 billion cat pictures on the Internet. The Internet has been described as a "virtual cat park, a social space for cat lovers in the same way that dog lovers congregate at a dog park". "The Daily Telegraph" deemed Nyan Cat the most popular Internet cat, while NPR gave this title to Grumpy Cat. "The Daily Telegraph" also deemed the best cat video on YouTube as "Surprised Kitty (Original)", which currently has over 75 million views. Buzzfeed deemed Cattycake the most important cat of 2010.
In 2015, an exhibition called "How Cats Took Over The Internet" opened at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The exhibition "looks at the history of how they rose to internet fame, and why people like them so much". There is even a book entitled "How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity: A Guide to Financial Freedom". The annual Internet Cat Video Festival celebrated and awards the Golden Kitty to cat videos. According to "Star Tribune", the festival's success is because "people realized that the cat video they'd chuckled over in the privacy of their homes was suddenly a thousand times funnier when there are thousands of other people around". "The Daily Telegraph" had an entire article devoted to International Cat Day. EMGN wrote an article entitled "21 Reasons Why Cats And The Internet Are A Match Made in Heaven".
In 2015, there were more than 2 million cat videos on YouTube, with an average of 12,000 views each – a higher average than any other category of YouTube content. Cats made up 16% of views in YouTube's "Pets &amp; Animals" category, compared to dogs' 23%. The YouTube video "Cats vs. Zombies" merged the two Internet phenomena of cats and zombies. Data from BuzzFeed and Tumblr has shown that dog videos have more views than those of cats, and less than 1% of posts on Reddit mention cats. While dogs are searched for much more than cats, there is less content on the Internet. The Facebook page "Cats" has over 2 million likes while Dogs has over 6.5 million. In an Internet tradition, "The New York Times" Archives X
account posts cat reporting throughout the history of the NYT. The Japanese prefecture of Hiroshima launched an online Cat Street View, which showed the region from the perspective of a cat.
Abigail Tucker, author of "The Lion in the Living Room", a history of domestic cats, has suggested that cats appeal particularly because they "remind us of our own faces, and especially of our babies ... [they're] strikingly human but also perpetually deadpan".
Psychology.
Jason Eppink, curator of the Museum of the Moving Image's show "How Cats Took Over the Internet", has noted the "outsized role" of cats on the Internet. "Wired" magazine felt that the cuteness of cats was "too simplistic" an explanation of their popularity online.
A scientific survey found that the participants were happier after watching cat videos. The researcher behind the survey explained "If we want to better understand the effects the Internet may have on us as individuals and on society, then researchers can't ignore Internet cats anymore" and "consumption of online cat-related media deserves empirical attention". The "Huffington Post" suggested that the videos were a form of procrastination, with most being watched while at work or ostensibly studying, while IU Bloomington commented "[it] does more than simply entertain; it boosts viewers' energy and positive emotions and decreases negative feelings". "Business Insider" argues "This falls in line with a body of research regarding the effects that animals have on people." A 2015 study by Jessica Gall Myrick found that people were more than twice as likely to post a picture or video of a cat to the Internet than they were to post a selfie.
Maria Bustillos considers cat videos to be "the crystallisation of all that human beings love about cats", with their "natural beauty and majesty" being "just one tiny slip away from total humiliation", which Bustillos sees as a mirror of the human condition. When the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, was asked for an example of a popular use of the Internet that he would never have predicted, he answered, "Kittens". A 2014 paper argues that cats' "unselfconsciousness" is rare in an age of hyper-surveillance, and cat photos appeal to people as it lets them imagine "the possibility of freedom from surveillance", while presenting the power of controlling that surveillance as unproblematic. "Time" magazine felt that cat images tap into viewers nature as "secret voyeurs".
The Cheezburger Network considers cats to be the "perfect canvas" for human emotion, as they have expressive facial and body aspects. Mashable offered "cats' cuteness, non-cuteness, popularity among geeks, blank canvas qualities, personality issues, and the fact that dogs just don't have 'it'" as possible explanations to cats' popularity on the Internet. A paper entitled """I Can Haz Emoshuns?" – Understanding Anthropomorphosis of Cats among Internet Users"" found that Tagpuss, an app that showed users cat images and asked them to choose their emotion "can be used to identify cat behaviours that lay-people find difficult to distinguish".
Jason Eppink, curator of the "How Cats Took Over the Internet" exhibition, explained: "People on the web are more likely to post a cat than another animal, because it sort of perpetuates itself. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. ["sic"]" Jason Kottke considers cats to be "easier to objectify" and therefore "easier to make fun of". Journalist Jack Shepherd suggested that cats were more popular than dogs because dogs were "trying too hard", and humorous behavior in a dog would be seen as a bid for validation. Shepherd sees cats' behavior as being "cool, and effortless, and devoid of any concern about what you might think about it. It is art for art's sake".
Cats have historically been associated with magic, and have been revered by various human cultures, the ancient Egyptians worshipping them as gods and the creatures being feared as demons in ancient Japan, such as the "bakeneko". "Vogue" magazine has suggested that the popularity of cats on the Internet is culturally-specific, being popular in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Other nations favor different animals online, Ugandans sharing images of goats and chickens, Mexicans preferring llamas, and Chinese Internet users sharing images of the river crab and grass-mud horse due to double-meanings of their names allowing them to "subvert government Internet censors".
Cute cat theory of digital activism.
The cute cat theory of digital activism is a theory concerning Internet activism, Internet censorship, and "cute cats" (a term used for any low-value, but popular online activity) developed by Ethan Zuckerman in 2008. It posits that most people are not interested in activism; instead, they want to use the web for mundane activities, including surfing for pornography and lolcats ("cute cats"). The tools that they develop for that (such as Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, and similar platforms) are very useful to social movement activists, who may lack resources to develop dedicated tools themselves. This, in turn, makes the activists more immune to reprisals by governments than if they were using a dedicated activism platform, because shutting down a popular public platform provokes a larger public outcry than shutting down an obscure one.
Celebrities.
Because of the relative newness of this industry, most owners of famous cats found themselves stumbling into Internet stardom without intentionally planning it.
Grumpy Cat.
Tardar Sauce (born April 4, 2012 – May 14, 2019), better known by her Internet name "Grumpy Cat", was a cat and Internet celebrity known for her grumpy facial expression. Her owner, Tabatha Bundesen, says that her permanently grumpy-looking face was due to an underbite and feline dwarfism. Grumpy Cat's popularity originated from a picture posted to the social news website Reddit by Bundesen's brother Bryan on September 22, 2012. It was made into an image macro with grumpy captions. As of December 10, 2014[ [update]], "The Official Grumpy Cat" page on Facebook has over 7 million "likes". Grumpy Cat was featured on the front page of "The Wall Street Journal" on May 30, 2013, and on the cover of "New York" magazine on October 7, 2013. In August 2015 it was announced that Grumpy Cat would get her own animatronic waxwork at Madame Tussauds in San Francisco. "The Huffington Post" wrote an article exploring America's fascination with cats.
Lil Bub.
Lil Bub (Lillian Bubbles) (June 21, 2011 – December 1, 2019) was an American celebrity cat known for her unique appearance. She was the runt of her litter. Her owner, Mike Bridavsky, adopted her when his friends called to ask him to give her a home. Her photos were first posted to Tumblr in November 2011 then taken off after being featured on the social news website reddit. "Lil Bub" on Facebook has over two million Likes. Lil Bub stars in "Lil Bub &amp; Friendz", a documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18, 2013, that won the Tribeca Online Festival Best Feature Film.
Maru.
Maru (まる, Japanese: "circle" or "round"; born May 24, 2007) is a male Scottish Fold (straight variety) cat in Japan who has become popular on YouTube. As of  2013[ [update]], videos with Maru have been viewed over 200 million times. Videos featuring Maru have an average of 800,000 views each and