In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! Cats share something more with us than mere creatureliness: they share, somehow, our central predicament. Beauty and panic, laziness and the potential for real idiocy. A certain predisposition to cruelty and indifference, mixed indiscriminately with a certain unaccountable warmth and gentleness.
Each one different, unpredictable, full of surprises. What we can but dimly apprehend of our own condition, we can readily see and identify in cats. Return with me, then, to the dawn of the internet, to those days of wonder and delight before any of us had heard of Twitter or Facebook; before Anonymous, before the revelations of Edward Snowden, before BuzzFeed, before even Google.
Before all the terrible things Adrian Chen wrote about at Wired in October of But there was something coming, that much was clear from early portents. Something hilarious, something absurd, something infinitely compelling. The website hampsterdance. The avalanche of interest in thoroughly idiotic videos of ridiculous animals was barely beginning. But with each increase in bandwidth came a slightly more sophisticated video, and another, until there were countless thousands.
By , Joel Veitch of rathergood. Cats Cats! Maru is so resplendently beautiful, so thickly furred and magnificent, and so utterly mellow that even watching mugumogu clean his ears with q-tips is an entirely relaxing and pleasurable experience.
But Maru is also a kook, and it is this kookiness that is responsible for the love his legion of fans bears him. Maru is perfectly capable of making a fool of himself over a bit of string, and he can fall off a cat tree with the best of them — but it is his determination to inhabit every available box, no matter how small or inconveniently situated, that seals his greatness and ensures his immortality.
No one will argue that there is much to regret about the evolution of the web since it took off in But against the swamps of Reddit, the deplorable authors of GamerGate, and all the horrific incursions of the Man, we may measure the lush, quiet satisfaction of watching Maru hurl himself into a box and then lie comfortably still, plump hind legs splayed, luxuriant tail swinging contentedly back and forth.
Such pleasures recall the words of Evelyn Waugh regarding PG Wodehouse, whose works similarly provide us with a balm against the sadness and grief of the world.
For Mr Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man… His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden. Dogs are having moment online. This, of course, is good. The headlines speak for themselves:. Spencer broke down some of the numbers and pegged the rise in dog popularity to the rise of Trump, and the need for more comforting animals. According to data provided by a spokesperson from the app, 22 of the 50 most followed pet accounts are dog-related.
Instagram data alone is not enough to justify writing this post or to conclude that dogs are more popular on the internet. To find out if dogs are as popular on other corners of the web, I checked Reddit. It turns out, that dogs rule there, too. Digging deeper into this, I found the increased popularity of dogs wasn't just anecdotal. It's borne out by internet search data. Google, the most popular search engine, has an analytics tool called Google Trends that allows you to parse through search data to compare what terms are more popular over time.
The tool is revealing but not conclusive, mainly because search terms don't necessarily indicate interest; after all, a search for "traffic jam" doesn't indicate that the searchee likes being trapped bumper-to-bumper.
Sifting through Google Trends data on the search volume of "cat videos" versus "dog videos," you'll notice that the trend lines mirror each other pretty evenly. For the past five years at least, there was a big spike in both searches around Christmas, which I guess says something about how people weather family time. Yet something interesting happened after December searches for "cat videos" began to consistently decline, while "dog videos" rose. In other words, the two began to diverge just as we were ringing in Then, right around March , interest spiked in the search term " doggos " — that is, the current cutesy internet slang name for cute dogs, analogous to "kittehz" in the days when cat slang reigned supreme.
I'm not the only one to have noticed this. The Daily Dot pointed out the surprising longevity of the "doge" meme, still popular even three years after it began — peculiarly long for memes, which tend to last a few months before fading.
Likewise, a year ago, in September — when, perhaps, the trend toward canines was just starting to become visible — Elana Cresci wrote an article in the Guardian speculating that cats seemed poised to be dethroned — declawed? Cresci points to the smartphone camera as partly responsible: Cats' personalities were better-suited to still images, whereas dogs are best captured in motion.
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