Cats have been a thing on the Internet almost as long as we've had the World Wide Web. Cat memes are legion, and social media has made stars of felines like Sockington, Maru, and Lil Bub (who is even having her genome sequenced). There are festivals and art installation raves about cat videos. Jessica Myrick, a professor at Indiana University, set out to quantify the behavioral effect of exposure to all those cat videos, and the results have just been published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior.
Is this obsession with Internet cats a good thing for society? We know that having a pet improves one's mood, but does just does watching Maru leap into boxes satisfy this same part of us? Prof. Myrick surveyed consumers of Internet cat content, looking to find motivation and detect emotion. She also tested a new model of how procrastination, guilt, happiness, and enjoyment are interrelated when it comes to our guilty pleasures on the Internet.
There are three schools of thought on why people to turn to Internet cats. The first is best exemplified by Emergency Kitten, which delivers users a dose of (Creative Commons-licensed) baby cat as a palliative for stressful times. Next is procrastination—for instance, when someone spends their time looking at cat pictures in their Twitter timeline rather than finishing up an article, perhaps. Thirdly, there might be a personality component: different personality types are predisposed towards fixes of digital felines—particularly introverts, because cats are seen as antisocial animals.
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