Cute cat videos that bring comfort to our otherwise brutal and hectic lives are everywhere. But where do they actually come from?
Bisness on social media is all about the clicks, so we need a never-ending supply of content that generate those. It is websites such as Viralnova and Fiidi who provide us with, what I'd like call, the spectacle of the obscure. Take an example from Tadar Sauce, the Grumpy Cat, who has been made famous through social media. He is that weird downward mouthed cat you might know.
The spectacle of the obscure brings with it the chance to gawp at things which are slightly peculiar, a bit nuts and most definitely crazy as hell. Examples include a squirrel eating civilized with a fork and 25 freaky islands of the world!
What's important to note, though, is that in the world before web 2.0 and its gadgets, this kind of content would've never made it over the threshold of the traditional media like television and the newspapers. What has changed is that we're now endlessly consuming content through our mobile devices, and cat videos and the like is what we're being fed.
This losely reminds me of the concept of "the society of spectacle" that I came across on one of last autumn's uni courses. Many (media) theorists, such as Baudrillard and Focault, indicate that masses (audiences) share some kind of collective conscientiousness through media contents. In other words, media content is in a way a representation of the society at large to itself. This begs the question: is the collective space that exists in social media channels, for example, just a depressing way of dumbing down the receiver with cute cats?
Put in that light, watching cute cat videos doesn't seem such a delightful thing, but they're fun. And that is all that counts on a Monday with crappy weather like it is here in Helsinki today. Funny cat memes shall keep me warm in the winter backlash we're experiencing here!
