Cats and the Internet – a Review

Of all the unintended consequences of progress – or perhaps that’s just change – I don’t think any of us could have predicted the impact of the internet on cats. Yes, cats.

Just when they’d breathed a collective sigh of relief that they were no longer widespread subjects of suspicion as medieval witches’ familiars, black cats have found themselves in trouble again. Apparently, they don’t work out as well in selfies, and this is seeing them dumped in increasing numbers for allegedly more selfie-genic tabbies and gingers. Among the burgeoning universe of First World Problems, having to turf your wrong-coloured kitty onto the roadside in order to crank up your selfie virality must rate pretty highly.

Displaced onto a mountaintop in northern Iraq with no food or water and extremists closing in to massacre you? Sure, that’d suck. But when I take a photo of my cat all you can see are its eyes, dammit. Can’t you feel my pain?

Maybe the pressure on cats to boost the appeal of their owners’ selfies wouldn’t be quite so great if it hadn’t been for their dominance in another corner of the internet. While quirky cats pics go back almost to the birth of photography – the Victorians were right into it, putting cats in crinoline skirts and captioning whimsically – it wasn’t until 2007 that a cat first lolled us with a line as winning as ‘I can haz cheezburger’.

It was only with the arrival of the internet that we learned (a) cats can talk (b) thay don no sheet about gramr and spayling and (c) that combo is pretty much a guaranteed crack-up. The web now has close to 15 million hits worth of lolcats. Seriously, if you’re a cat and you’re not lolling, you’re not up to much. Expect to be kicked to the kerb.

But lolcats don’t just haz cheezburger. They’re into everything now. Ceiling Cat is no longer merely watching you attend to your personal needs – Ceiling Cat now has a Bible in her/his language. That’s right. By 2010, the Bible had been translated into lolcat. It’s only a matter of time before, among the John 3:16 crowd clustered at the 18th green at Augusta, we see a tabby holding a sign that reads ‘So liek teh Ceiling Kitteh lieks teh ppl lots and he sez “Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleeves him u wont evr diez no moar, kthxbai!”’

Is this what the founding parents of the webz were thinking when they bunged together a bunch of networks in the early seventies and realised they’d begun a thing they called ‘internetworking’?

No. Surely they were thinking, hey, if this works out really well, maybe a bunch of people like us will get together over the wires and do something awesomely useful like … translate the Bible into Klingon. Not to worry. Work on that mighty task began in 1994 and continues to this day, though hampered somewhat by the wiki crowd being distracted by hilarious pics of non-black cats, and Klingons lacking any concept of, or word for, God.

(This piece first appeared in Monday’s mX in Australia.)

Advertisement