What is it About Cats That Took Over the Internet?
What made Grumpy Cat and his brethren internet celebrities? Where does our fascination with cat videos come from?
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Two million (and counting) cat videos on YouTube beg the question: Why? Why are years and years worth of cat-footage the most preferred form of procrastination? With it’s new exhibition on “How cats took over the Internet,” the Museum of Moving Images in New York has set out to answer this question.
A staggering 26 billion views on YouTube are views on cat videos. It all started in 2005, when Steve Chen, co-founder of Youtube put up a video of his cat, Pajamas playing with a rope, thereby changing internet history.
Pyjamas plays with a rope, and changes history
Quickly, regular videos of cats doing regular things were replaced with pictures and videos of cats doing funny things. Thus, LOLcat was born. The birth of LOLcat is a hallmark moment – the day a new internet-speak dictionary was written.
Studies have been quick to follow. That cat videos make us happy is a popular (and rather obvious) opinion. Cats are cute and we are physiologically wired to love cute. A personal favourite is that cats are accomplished flirts: playing hard to get arouses our interest. At the end of the day, whatever the reason, cat videos are here to stay. Here’s a quick look at the cats that changed our lives and became household names:
Meet Grumpy Cat
And LIL Bub
And here’s a video of Maru Cat
And last, and the most famous and somewhat annoying, Nyan Cat