By far, cats and cat-memes are probably the most common and universal subject in the Internet. What about dogs you ask? Well, I did some Googling, and after a few minutes of research, I will answer that question, among others…
THE INTERNET IS MADE OUT OF CATS
The world is fascinated by cats. Period. There are more cat videos and photos than shiat about dogs. Yup, Da Vinci, my dog will not like this fact.
In the US, there exists nearly 100 Million cats. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why they are so pervasive. “There are also an almost infinite number of pictures of cats or great bits of cat footage because so many people have them, meaning an abundance of raw material for meme creation,” says Matt Smith, director of strategy at The Viral Factory.
The basic theory about “They’re Cute” is easy to explain. No need to expound on that.
Fat cats are fat. And they’re funny. Period.
Another answer to the myth suggests that cats are the perfect canvass for human expression. According to a post from Mashable; “Cats have very expressive facial and body expressions, so they are a perfect canvas for human emotion, which makes them awesome for captioning and anthropomorphization,” says Ben Huh, CEO of The Cheezburger Network.
WHY CAT MEMES ARE COOL
It’s a bright and sunny day. Armed with your camera, you call out to your cat so you could make your own cat meme. What are the chances of your meme becoming widely accepted and going viral? Pretty damn huge, says Gyurka Jansen, an online strategist and blogger: “Making a cat video is instantly recognizable by others. Making a cat-video, or captioning a picture is something where you can never go wrong. You might want to go crazy and make a hamster-video, but this isn’t instantly recognized by your peers as something that could be worth their time.”
Alrighty then, hamsters are dull. Point taken.
Cats are so widespread on the Internet that digital giant Google assembled 16,000 computers and developed an algorithm to teach their special AI (Artificial Intelligence) to learn on its own. And what better way to train this robot-brain than to have it search the internet and catalog the most common subject: CATS!
“The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items.” wrote the NY Times.
Wow! Check out the video of that here.
SO WHY NOT DOGS?
And now we tackle the timeless debate.
Why are cats, cat photos, cat memes and cat videos more popular and more accepted than dogs?
In a nutshell, dogs will try their darnest best to make you think they’re cool. But they’re actually not.
Cats will always surprise you with the spontaneity of the situation.
“When a dog gets in a box, it’s because he desperately wants you to think he’s cool. When a cat does it, it’s because it suddenly felt like the right thing to do at the time. More often than not, it totally was. I think it’s the very aloofness of cats that makes us want to caption their thoughts, or put them in front of a keyboard and see what happens. The many Keyboard Dogs were a failure not just because they came second, but because they were enjoying themselves far too much.” says Jack Shepherd, community manager at BuzzFeed
I’m pretty darn sure that dog-lovers will disagree. But that is the subject of another post.
Whatever the theories, whatever the reasons, one thing will be constant:
Cats will remain on the Internet and I see no way of stopping them (for now, at least).
So, for all you cat-lovers and cat-meme fans, I leave you with my personal picks…
‘Nuff said. Let’s go populate the Internet with MORE CATS!
And as a tribute to cats, let’s all sing this song…
Peace!
GM Tristan. September 2012.
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