Why Cats Rule the Internet, and Will Rule the World
So, I just read this article* about parenting, and it got me thinking. About cats. See, unlike babies, I actually have cats. Lots of people have cats. In fact, cats are sort-of like pre-babies for the human set. And then there are sensible people, like me, who intend *only* to have cats, and no babies.
The article traces the development of the concept of ‘parenthood,’ from a time when most people shared a house with their extended families, growing up surrounded by other people’s children until they had their own, to the modern era, where most adults spend a significant portion of their life neither being nor living with children (going through both pre- and post-children phases). This is where the cats come in. See, after moving out of their parents’ house, but before having children of their own, many people have cats. They have dogs, too, but typically, because dogs are a bigger responsibility than cats (they can’t shit inside), they tend to come later and less frequently. Cats are more like roommates, in that they can essentially take care of themselves, requiring only feeding (and even then, there are a multitude of cat-feeding tools so that one can go almost a week without filling up the cat food distributor). Young adults (as in, people who have not yet had babies, not teenagers who want to be called ‘Young Adults‘ when in reality they are just teenagers) care for cats the way they cared for younger relatives in more crowded times, or the way they will eventually care for babies. Cats thus become the analog for babies.
As we all know (and if you didn’t, the article will tell you), people with babies like talking about their babies. People without babies, it follows, like talking about their cats. In the early(er?) days of the internet, when lolcats began (according to Wikipedia this was in 2005, but as we all know that is forever in Internet time), there were lots of people using their digital cameras to share their lives. Of course, for those of us with no babies, we were forced instead to share pictures of our cats. The original i-can-has-cheezburger cat may be an example of overzealous cat-parenting, seeing as it appears to be a professionally-shot, posed portrait of a cat, but regardless, many of us spend time photographing and videotaping our cats, and consider doing so completely normal. This time translated quickly into an abundance of cat photos on the internet, available for lol-ifying.
Now, there are also plenty of baby pictures on the internet, but for the most part, people don’t really spread baby pictures to people they don’t know, while there are entire websites devoted to pictures of cats. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s not really your fault if you have an ugly cat. An ugly baby, on the other hand… Plus, babies are future-humans. They will eventually grow up and get mad that you spent some part of their childhood mocking them. Cats, however, can’t read. Unless they are hungry, they don’t really care what you’re doing.
And that is how cats took over the Internet: by being adorable and mockable at the same time. Indeed, cats are the perfect babies: you don’t have to worry about them getting into college, or drive them to soccer/piano/ballet practice, but you can tell people all about how adorable they are, and prove it with pictures. Really, all that remains now is for us to stop having babies, and to start having more kittens.
*Look, I get a subscription to The New Yorker from one of my aunts, and this means that in the cold, dark times between glossy fashion magazines, which only publish monthly, my main source of bathroom reading is The New Yorker. Occasionally, I read the whole magazine cover to cover. It’s not always worth it. Then again, there are those times when my husband puts my magazines someplace completely ludicrous, like the living room, and I am left trying to make meaning out of the Victoria’s Secret catalogs. Hint: the meaning is boobs. Footnote post-script: I do feel that it is a still-positive sign of my continuing youth that I do not yet actually subscribe to any magazines on my own. Then again, this does mean that when I tell my mom I’m just plain old not reading Cooking Light, she keeps sending it anyway ‘because it’s free.’
Regular Post-Script: I am composing this entry in G-Mail because Word 2007 is too slow to function properly when iTunes is also working (currently it is downsizing some of my audiobooks from 256 kps to 128 kps because they are taking up too much room on my hard drive and sound quality is not as big a deal in audiobooks as it is in music), and I noticed that when you start a new e-mail composition, you get a screen with no ads on the right hand side, but when you return to a draft you began previously, there are ads on the right! This is a clear sign that Google is trying to force you to finish everything in one go. Google is ruining revision! The writing process will never be the same! Ahem. </masshysteria>
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