Cats as a Mass Culture phenomenon
In my summer course on Popular Culture, we are asked to make a blog post every week about any aspect of popular culture we want and relate it to our readings. Today I made mine about cats on the internet. I'm not allowed to link the blog it was on, as its a private one for the class only, but I'll post what I wrote under the cut.
(Disclaimer: This video is not accurate in the slightest, but it is a good opener to the blog post.)
If you go on youtube.com today and search up the word 'cat' you are guaranteed to find over half a million videos tagged with the word. Most of these are people making home recordings of their cats doing something silly, adorable or even something as simple as sleeping. Cats were always a popular house pet, right next to dogs, because they were social creatures that other people could interact with. Yet with the coming of the internet and video uploading, on sites like youtube, people could now experience what it was like to live with a cat without actually owning one. Cats themselves have become a massive culture on the internet, with millions of cat owners and lovers tuning in to watch a one minute video clip of a cat doing something adorable.
So why do people upload these videos of their pets for the world to view? Surely there are enough videos already of cats sleeping, playing with toys or doing anything else that one would consider worth putting online, so why is there always more and more of them? MacDonald says in his essay, A Theory on Mass Culture, that mass culture is "very democratic: it absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody" (42) which very easily explains why there are so many of these videos. No matter how many different cats people see doing something worth watching, people will view it if it interests them.
The internet has a diversity of media to show and it isn't just videos that draw cat lovers. One site that helped popularize the mass culture's obsession with cats on the internet was the funny picture site I can haz cheezburger which hosts to this day hundreds of thousands of different pictures showing cats with different funny captions. While funny cat pictures have existed for many years, dating back to photographer Harry Pointer in the late 19th century taking pictures of his own cats doing silly things the phenomenon of it becoming an internet craze for the mass culture began between 2005-2006. It wasn't started by anyone famous or well-known, but by an anonymous userbase on the internet. What makes this bit of mass culture unique was that it was not "imposed from above" or created by "technicians hired by businessmen" (40) as Macdonald would say, but started by the very culture that consumes it. It was brewed by people behind a computer and spread around by them. Now, about half a decade later, I Can Haz Cheezburger gets over millions of webpage hits on their site per day and has turned itself into a corporation, employing people from all over the country to help manage the website and merchandise it makes. All thanks to people putting up silly pictures of cats around the internet.
Whether you like cats or not, it is clear that this is a mass culture phenomenon that will not go quietly into the night for a long time, if not ever as long as the internet exists. It has already gained national attention from press and media outlets like Times magazine and proves that the internet has more of an influence over the consensus of what is popular, outside of other big scale operations like social networking sites.
Play me off keyboard cat.
Click to view(Disclaimer: This video is not accurate in the slightest, but it is a good opener to the blog post.)
If you go on youtube.com today and search up the word 'cat' you are guaranteed to find over half a million videos tagged with the word. Most of these are people making home recordings of their cats doing something silly, adorable or even something as simple as sleeping. Cats were always a popular house pet, right next to dogs, because they were social creatures that other people could interact with. Yet with the coming of the internet and video uploading, on sites like youtube, people could now experience what it was like to live with a cat without actually owning one. Cats themselves have become a massive culture on the internet, with millions of cat owners and lovers tuning in to watch a one minute video clip of a cat doing something adorable.
So why do people upload these videos of their pets for the world to view? Surely there are enough videos already of cats sleeping, playing with toys or doing anything else that one would consider worth putting online, so why is there always more and more of them? MacDonald says in his essay, A Theory on Mass Culture, that mass culture is "very democratic: it absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody" (42) which very easily explains why there are so many of these videos. No matter how many different cats people see doing something worth watching, people will view it if it interests them.
The internet has a diversity of media to show and it isn't just videos that draw cat lovers. One site that helped popularize the mass culture's obsession with cats on the internet was the funny picture site I can haz cheezburger which hosts to this day hundreds of thousands of different pictures showing cats with different funny captions. While funny cat pictures have existed for many years, dating back to photographer Harry Pointer in the late 19th century taking pictures of his own cats doing silly things the phenomenon of it becoming an internet craze for the mass culture began between 2005-2006. It wasn't started by anyone famous or well-known, but by an anonymous userbase on the internet. What makes this bit of mass culture unique was that it was not "imposed from above" or created by "technicians hired by businessmen" (40) as Macdonald would say, but started by the very culture that consumes it. It was brewed by people behind a computer and spread around by them. Now, about half a decade later, I Can Haz Cheezburger gets over millions of webpage hits on their site per day and has turned itself into a corporation, employing people from all over the country to help manage the website and merchandise it makes. All thanks to people putting up silly pictures of cats around the internet.
Whether you like cats or not, it is clear that this is a mass culture phenomenon that will not go quietly into the night for a long time, if not ever as long as the internet exists. It has already gained national attention from press and media outlets like Times magazine and proves that the internet has more of an influence over the consensus of what is popular, outside of other big scale operations like social networking sites.
Play me off keyboard cat.