https://www.treehugger.com/why-cats-rule-internet-4862720 Why Cats Rule the Internet
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There are just as many dogs on the Web, so why do cats get all the attention?
Cats may not be man’s best friend, but the Internet apparently didn't get the memo.
“Cats” is one of the most-searched-for terms on the Internet,
and YouTube videos starring felines account for more than 26 billion views,
making them the single most popular category on the site.
However, on YouTube, as well as sites like Reddit, Buzzfeed and Instagram, dogs are posted and tagged just as often as cats. In fact, YouTube actually gets more searches for dogs than cats. Yet cat content gets almost four times more viral views than content featuring dogs, according to Jack Shepherd, Buzzfeed’s editorial director.
What’s behind this phenomenon?
We come from a long history of cat people.
Our fascination with felines is hardly new. Cave paintings of cats date back 10,000 years, and ancient Egyptians considered the animals to be sacred, even mummifying some felines just like humans.
However, with the advent of the Internet, we suddenly had a much easier way to share cat content.
"It's not so much creating this interest in cats, it's more exploiting this interest that was already there,” Miles Orvell, a cultural historian, told New Republic.
Even lolcats — those humorous cat photos captioned with poorly spelled catspeak — date back to more than a century ago. During the 1870s, photographer Harry Pointer snapped photos of cats mimicking human activities and captioned them with witticisms.
The topic of how cats became the stars of the online world is so fascinating to curator Jason Eppink that he created an entire exhibit on the topic at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image.
“How Cats Took Over the Internet” traces the evolution of kitties from cat-centric chat rooms to famous felines like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, but according to “Wired,” if other cultures had dominated the Web in its early days, this exhibit might be about another animal entirely.
“Cuteness varies from culture to culture,” writes Margaret Rhodes. “...in some African countries, goats are the most popular pet, so they embody cuteness. Because the U.S. and Japan dominate Internet culture, cats dominate the Internet.”