If kittens rule the Internet, why do puppies reign in
print?
Illustration by Luke Pearson
Reader, if you and I can agree on anything, it's that the Internet is made of cats. But we may differ on the follow-up: What else could it be made of? When cats took over on our screens and in our minds, whose regime, exactly, did they replace?
For too long we've talked as if the online feline emerged from nowhere, to fill a niche that
hadn't yet existed. We've made out cats to be the brand-new products of a
brand-new age and ignored the fact that before we had the Internet, and before
the Internet had its furry
totem, media consumers held a different set of animal predilections. We've
forgotten that the readers from that ancient age of dusty books preferred the
dog, and so they do today. Before the Web page there was the written word.
Before kittens ruled the Internet, puppies reigned in print.
The real mystery, then, is not how cats took precedence online, but rather
how they managed to dethrone the dog. Our media have been split in two, and each
opposing camp—the old against the new—has a spirit animal suited to its ethos.
We're reading dogs and clicking cats. Knopf is a borzoi.
BuzzFeed is a Scottish Fold.
When did our entertainments break along these species lines? And what will
happen to the dog, once so proud in literature, as the industry that championed
it limps into the future?
* * *
Surely you'll be inclined to grant the premise: Think of Maru the
Cat; think of Marley & Me. But let me try to make the case using
more objective means. Precisely how do dogs and cats compare online, and then
again in print?
The other day I went to visit Yahoo and plugged in the words "cat" and
"cats." (I tried them 10 times each.) My searches pulled an average of 1.8
billion hits, nearly two giga-cats of data on the Internet. Then I did the same
with "dog" and "dogs," and received one-third as many results. For every
Web-enabled pooch, three kittens danced on
YouTube.
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