Memewhile ... how cats won the internet (and helped kickstart the Arab Spring)

ANDREW MASTERSON

December 14 2014

Jason South

 

Dr Stephen Fleischfresser and his cat, Max Power, to whom he is hopelessly devoted.

The world's oldest two-faced cat died in the US last week. The passing of Frank-and-Louie, as he was known, was noted by news outlets an astonishing 1.3 million times. Posts on social media quite possibly outnumbered grains of sand on Bondi Beach.

Mentioned less often, but still significant, was the opening this month of a cat cafe in Ballarat. It joins one in Melbourne, 39 in Japan and at least 47 dotted around the rest of the globe.

Somehow, in the past few years, cats have stopped being simply pets and become a phenomenon. In a weird act of convergent techno-evolution, the metamorphosis of cats into cultural icons is powered by – and in turn powers – the growth of the internet.

In 2013, 30 million Google searches used just the word "cats". Kim Kardashian wishes she was a cat. "The prevalence and popularity of cats on the internet is due to the wide variety of ideas and feelings associated with them – cats are very versatile signifiers," explained Dr Radha O'Meara, lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and author of a recent study titled Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube: surveillance and the pleasures of cat videos. "Cats are common throughout much of the world, so they can be readily accessed as subjects to be recorded with little regard for geography, culture, language and class. When people engage with cats, it is not necessarily dependent on language.  Much of the internet is segregated by language, but cats can transcend this."

Indeed, as many have noted, the internet is made of cats. The cute colonisation of the web is closely linked to the advent of social media. The earliest known cat clip, CatBread by Hirose Takuro, cropped up in 2002, two years before the launch of Facebook. After that, proliferation was exponential.
The cat clip genre, however, is much older than the net itself. Its creation can be traced to a one-minute silent movie called The Boxing Cats, made by Edison Films in 1894. It shows two cats, boxing. (As Thomas Edison no doubt commented at the time, lol.)

Today, researchers are analysing a wide range of feline-related cultural matters – from the grammar of lolcat memes to the semiotics of cat films – and coming up with some surprising findings. Cats push down the price of internet shopping. Cats offered as click-bait are a prime tool for market researchers.  Cats caused the Arab Spring and might shake the Chinese government.

"The internet's content could have been vast and operatic," said Jason Potts, professor of economics at RMIT. "But instead the entire media consumption landscape became faster, shorter, of lower quality, and with much more in it. Cat memes are a perfect example of this."

In a recent paper, The Alchian-Allen Theorem and the Economics of Internet Animals, Professor Potts explored what he termed "the economics of cute."

"Cute, in conjunction with the internet, affects the trade-offs involved in choices people make," he wrote. "Let me put that more starkly: cute shapes the economy."

The Alchian-Allen Theorem suggests that if the transport costs of two items – nice apples and wrinkly apples, for instance – are the same, then consumers will tend to choose the higher quality product, because it is relatively cheap compared the crap one. In cyberspace, however, the process also works in reverse  because transport costs are zero.

The degree of effort required to access a product is a kind of cost. Given the choice of travelling 50km to see a one-hour Bach performance and covering the same distance to see a two-minute cat film, most people will opt for the posh music. On the net the effort – the cost – required  to access either is negligible and identical. So guess what happens?

"The internet developed and therefore the costs of access fell," Professor Potts told The Sunday Age. "But costs at the lower end of the quality spectrum have fallen even more, so the higher end is relatively more expensive than it was."

Jan Villalon 

 

From Maru to Grumpy Cat to Henri, our kitty-crazed meme culture has spawned a new (and adorable) generation of celebrities cashing in on the clicks.

It's always been "worth" going to some effort watch a Bach show. It only became "worth" watching a piece of fluff about a cat called Fluffy when the effort required to do so dropped to near-zero.

The result, as he wrote, has been a consumer drift toward "more, different, and lower quality: toward five minutes of internet animals, rather than a full day at the zoo."

It's an economic reality that that does far more than stimulate demand for kitten memes or push Grumpy Cat's income above that of Gwyneth Paltrow's. It can bring down totalitarian regimes. .
In 2007, Ethan Zuckerman, director the Centre for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, invented what he termed The Cute Cat Theory to explain the online behaviour of people living under repressive governments. Last year, he summarised how the theory applied to real world examples in Tunisia and China.

In 2004, a group of expatriate Tunisian activists, called Nawaat, started posting clips of the Tunisian president's private plane on a popular video-sharing platform called DailyMotion. The clips implied corruption and high-level ratbaggery. The response of the Tunisian authorities was to block access to the service.

Not many Tunisians saw the videos showing the plane – they were too busy watching "quotidian cute-cat" clips. But when the government blocked access to the whole of DailyMotion, thereby depriving people of their regular kitten-falls-off-table fix, anger became widespread and the rebellion began.

The censorship might have looked like a victory for the Tunisian government, Zuckerman wrote. But because "the contemporary internet was designed, in no small part, for the dissemination of cute pictures of cats  ... censorship may have increased the reach and impact of Nawaat's action."

Zuckerman identifies a similar process underway in China today, where social media – the Facebook-like Weibo, in particular – is heavily censored. The Cute Cat Theory still applies, he says, noting that the Chinese government wouldn't dare risk shutting the service down completely and thereby angering its 450 million users.

In China, however, cat images have in part been replaced by pictures of river crabs (the name of which is a pun on censorship) and something called a "grass mud horse", the name of which, Zuckerman explains, translates as "a vile insult about one's mother's anatomy."

The species might be different, but the hidden paw of the cute cat is still detectable. And, learning perhaps from Tunisia, the Chinese authorities this month tacitly admitted that banning references to crabs and fictional horses was dangerous. Instead, they issued an edict condemning their use as puns, instructing editors and moderators to stamp out "the misuse of idioms."

Here in the West, puns face no restrictions, but internet users nevertheless are subject to other types of surveillance – enabled, in significant part, by cute cats.

Every day, millions of people watch cat videos on YouTube, which is owned by Google – a company that makes a hunk of income through collecting, collating and then selling information about its users.

"Ultimately," concludes Radha O'Meara, "cat videos enable viewers to facilitate our own surveillance, and we do so with the gleeful abandon of a kitten jumping in a tissue box."
In the non-Mandarin-speaking world, river crabs are unlikely to dethrone cats any time soon. But why? Why cats specifically, instead of, say, dogs, guinea pigs or, indeed,horses?

Dr O'Meara points to the late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who suggested that images of cats served "as an allegory for all the cats of the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables." Cats might be terrible at chasing sticks, but they are very good at being metaphors.

"Cats are inscrutable," said Dr O'Meara. "This makes them perfect vehicles for human to project ideas and feelings onto. Cats seem to transcend mediation, because they appear unselfconscious before the camera. Cats can be unpredictable, so they offer an impression of immediacy. Cat behaviour seems authentic, because they are not readily coerced."

Dr Stephen Fleischfresser, lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at Melbourne University, finds clues to the primacy of cats online in psychology and evolution. He suggests that many internet users think of themselves as independent and proud. "It's the vanity of anthropomorphism," he said. "They are seeing themselves reflected in cats."

And thus has it ever been, he continued. Cats were revered in ancient Egypt, reviled as witch-familiars in Medieval times, and now constitute an online cuteness plague. Cats have always been symbols as well as pets.

And the funniest thing? The cats don't give a damn. They never have.

"Dogs first came into the human sphere as scavengers and were then genetically manipulated to keep their social traits," said Dr Fleischfresser. "Cats only came into the human sphere because our houses contained rodents. Cats chose us, in a weird way, not the other way around. Cats remain completely independent. Their attitude to us is 'screw you, human, I don't care what you do just as long as you keep attracting rats'."

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