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Images and videos of domestic cats make up some of the most viewed content on the web, particularly image macros in the form of lolcats. ThoughtCatalog has described cats as the "unofficial ‘mascot of the Internet’".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Why The Internet Chose Cats )〕 The subject has attracted the attention of various scholars and critics, who have analysed why this form of "low art" has reached iconic status within the public consciousness. Though it may be considered "frivolous", cat-related internet content "actually constitute() a large amount of the way in which we participate with the media and culture".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=How Cats Took Over the Internet—And Became Art )〕 Many argue that there is much depth and complexity between this seemingly simple content, with links being made to the positive psychological effects that pet animals have on their owners: "viewing Internet cats may actually function as a form of digital pet therapy and/or stress relief for Internet users."〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Comment: The fascinating, feel-good psychology of Internet cat videos )〕 Some individual cats, such as Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, are used because of their unusual appearances. ==History== Humans have always had a close relationship with cats, and the animals have long been a subject of short films, including the early silent movies ''Boxing Cats'' (1894) and ''The Sick Kitten'' (1903).〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=‘How Cats Took Over the Internet’ Actually Shows They Didn’t )〕 Harry Pointer (1822–1889) has been cited as the "progenitor of the shameless cat picture".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Why Does the Internet Love Cats So Much? () )〕 Cats have been shared via email since the internet's inception in the 1990s.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Why cat clips rule the internet )〕 The first cat video on YouTube was uploaded in 2005 by YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, who "posted a video of his cat called Pyjamas playing with a rope".〔 The following year, "Puppy vs Cat" became the first viral cat video; uploaded by a user called Sanchey, as of 2015 it had over 16 million views on YouTube.〔 In a Mashable article that explored the history of cat media on the internet, the oldest entry was an Ascii art cat that originated on 2channel, and was a pictoral representation of the phrase "Please go away." ''The New York Times'' described cat images as "that essential building block of the Internet". In addition, 2,594,329 cat images had been manually annotated in flickr.com by users.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Cat Head Detection – How to Effectively Exploit Shape and Texture Features )〕 An interesting phenomenon is that many photograph owners tag their house cats as “tiger".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=IEEE Xplore – Sign In )〕 Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami started the website I Can Haz Cheezburger in 2007, where they shared funny pictures of cats. This site allowed users to create LOLcat memes by placing writing on top of pictures of their cats. This site now has more than 100 million views per month and has "created a whole new form of internet speak".〔 In 2009, the humour site Urlesque deemed September 9 "A Day Without Cats Online", and had over 40 blogs and websites agree to "() cats from their pages for at least 24 hours".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title='A Day Without Cats Online': Internet Ban by Urlesque – TIME )〕 As of 2015, there are over 2 million cat videos on YouTube alone, and cats are one of the most searched keywords on the internet.〔 CNN extimated that in 2015 there could be around 6.5 billion cat pictures on the internet. The internet has been described as a "virtual cat park, a social space for cat lovers in the same way that dog lovers congregate at a dog park."〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Cats and the internet )〕 ''The Daily Telegraph'' deemed Nyan Cat the most popular internet cat,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Top 10 internet cats hall of fame )〕 while NPR gave this title to Grumpy Cat.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Friday Feline Fun: A Ranking Of The Most Famous Internet Cats )〕 ''The Daily Telegraph'' also deemed the best cat video on YouTube as "Surprised Kitty (Original)", which currently has over 75 million views.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Video: The 10 best cat videos on YouTube – Telegraph )〕 Buzzfeed deemed Cattycake the most important cat of 2010.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The 30 Most Important Cats Of 2010 )〕 In 2015, an exhibition called "How Cats Took Over The Internet" opened at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=How cats took over the internet: new exhibition is catnip for feline fans )〕 The exhibition "looks at the history of how they rose to internet fame, and why people like them so much."〔 There is even a book entitled ''How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity: A Guide to Financial Freedom''.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity )〕 The annual Internet Cat Video Festival celebrated and awards the Golden Kitty to cat videos.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Golden Kitty: Cat lovers gather for 'pawstigious' internet video awards )〕 According to ''Star Tribune'', the festival's success is because "people realized that the cat video they’d chuckled over in the privacy of their homes was suddenly a thousand times funnier when there are thousands of other people around".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Internet Cat Video Festival draws thousands to St. Paul - StarTribune.com )〕 ''The Daily Telegraph'' had an entire article devoted to International Cat Day.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=International Cat Day: felines take over the internet (even more than usual) )〕 EMGN wrote an article entitled "21 Reasons Why Cats And The Internet Are A Match Made in Heaven".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=21 Reasons Why Cats And The Internet Are A Match Made in Heaven )〕 In 2015, there were more than 2 million cat videos on YouTube, with an average of 12,000 views each - a higher average than any other category of YouTube content.〔 Cats made up 16% of views in YouTube's "Pets & Animals" category, compared to dogs' 23%. The YouTube video ''Cats vs. Zombies'' merged the two internet phenomena of cats and zombies.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Internet Win: Cats VS Zombies )〕 Data from BuzzFeed and Tumblr has shown that dog videos have more views than those of cats, and less than 1% of posts on Reddit mention cats.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=How Cats Became Rulers of the Interwebs )〕 While dogs are searched for much more than cats, there is less content on the internet.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Supply And Demand Of Internet Dogs And Cats )〕 The Facebook page "Cats" has over 2 million likes while Dogs has over 6.5 million.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Does the Internet love cats or dogs more? – Digital Trends )〕 In an Internet tradition, ''The New York Times'' Archives Twitter account posts cat reporting throughout the history of the NYT.〔() 〕 The Japanese prefecture of Hiroshima launched an online Cat Street View, which showed the region from the perspective of a cat. ==Psychology== Jason Eppink, curator of the Museum of the Moving Image's show ''How Cats Took Over the Internet'', has noted the "outsized role" of cats on the Internet. Wired magazine felt that the cuteness of cats was "too simplistic" an explanation of their popularity online.〔 A survey asking people how they felt before and after watching videos of cats found that subjects felt happier after watching videos of cats, and less anxious or sad.〔〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Emotion regulation, procrastination, and watching cat videos online: Who watches Internet cats, why, and to what effect? )〕 The researcher behind the survey explained "If we want to better understand the effects the Internet may have on us as individuals and on society, then researchers can't ignore Internet cats anymore"〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Scientists Explain Why Watching Internet Cat Videos Is Good for You )〕 and "consumption of online cat-related media deserves empirical attention". The Huffington Post suggested that the videos were a form of procrastination, with most being watched while at work or ostensibly studying,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Cat Videos Can Give You Energy And A Positive Attitude, Study Says )〕 while IU Bloomington commented "() does more than simply entertain; it boosts viewers' energy and positive emotions and decreases negative feelings".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Not-so-guilty pleasure: Viewing cat videos boosts energy and positive emotions, IU study finds )〕 BusinessInsider argues "This falls in line with a body of research regarding the effects that animals have on people."〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Internet loves cat videos for a surprisingly good reason, says new study )〕 A 2015 study by Jessica Gall Myrick found that people were more than twice as likely to post a picture or video of a cat to the internet than they were to post a selfie.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=So Here’s a Study About Internet Cats )〕 Maria Bustillos considers cat videos to be "the crystallisation of all that human beings love about cats", with their "natural beauty and majesty" being "just one tiny slip away from total humiliation", which Bustillos sees as a mirror of the human condition.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=BBC – Culture – How cats won the internet )〕 When the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, was asked for an example of a popular use of the internet that he would never had predicted, he answered "Kittens".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=I am Tim Berners-Lee. I invented the WWW 25 years ago and I am concerned and excited about its future. AMA : IAmA )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Inventor Of Web Astounded By All The Cats Online )〕 A 2014 paper argues that cats' "unselfconsciousness" is rare in an age of hyper-surveillance, and cat photos appeal to people as it lets them imagine "the possibility of freedom from surveillance", while presenting the power of controlling that surveillance as unproblematic.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos )〕 Time magazine felt that cat images tap into viewers nature as "secret voyeurs".〔 The Cheezburger Network considers cats to be the "perfect canvas" for human emotion, as they have expressive facial and body aspects.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Timelessness of Cat Pictures )〕 Mashable offered "cats' cuteness, non-cuteness, popularity among geeks, blank canvas qualities, personality issues and the fact that dogs just don't have "it"" as possible explanations to cats' popularity on the internet. A paper entitled "''“I Can Haz Emoshuns?” – Understanding Anthropomorphosis of Cats among Internet Users''" found that Tagpuss, an app that showed users cat images and asked them to choose their emotion "can be used to identify cat behaviours that lay-people find difficult to distinguish".〔http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/4654/1/Tagpuss_FINAL_parsed.pdf〕 Jason Eppink, curator of the “How Cats Took Over the Internet” exhibition, explained: “People on the web are more likely to post a cat than another animal, because it sort of perpetuates itself. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.”〔〔() 〕 Jason Kottke considers cats to be "easier to objectify" and therefore "easier to make fun of".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Internet is made of kittens )〕 Journalist Jack Shepherd suggested that cats were more popular than dogs because dogs were "trying too hard", and humorous behavior in a dog would be seen as a bid for validation. Shepherd sees cats' behavior as being "cool, and effortless, and devoid of any concern about what you might think about it. It is art for art's sake."〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Why the internet loves cats – not dogs )〕 Cats have historically been associated with magic, and have been revered by various human cultures, the ancient Egyptians worshipping them as gods and the creatures being feared as demons in ancient Japan,〔 such as the ''bakeneko''. Vogue magazine has suggested that the popularity of cats on the internet is culturally-specific, being popular in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Other nations favor different animals online, Ugandans sharing images of goats and chickens, Mexicans preferring llamas, and Chinese internet users sharing images of the river crab and grass-mud horse due to double-meanings of their names allowing them to "subvert government Internet censors".〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=5 Things We Learned at the Museum of Moving Images’s "How Cats Took Over the Internet" – Vogue )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cats and the Internet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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