World Wide Cat
I´m warning you! If you don´t want to waste your time, do not spend time reading this article.
Just imagine the following situation: you´re sitting in front of your computer and you want to check what happened at daytime, thus you enter facebook to participate in the lives of your friends as well as in current and important news that are striking and influence the world globally. Involuntarily, a new cat video appears in your visual field. I´m asking myself:
Why do so many people take pleasure in those nonsense videos?
It is more important than ever to filter the huge amount of information on the web in order to receive the ones that are significant for each individual!
The total incomprehension of being entertained by those irrelevant videos drove me to do some research on this. During my self-experiment I came up with 3 core reasons why people ‘enjoy‘ watching them:
- Private pleasure: Many people try to come down after school or work by watching some entertaining stuff in order to get away from all things that happened during daytime.
- Avoidance strategy: Human beings tend to postpone or even procrastinate work that has to be done, e.g. to do the housework or homework, business affairs etc. Useless stuff like cat videos make them forget their problems for a while.
- Diversion: Nowadays, the average person wants to quit and escape daily routines.
In my opinion these societal behaviours promoted cat videos in its popularity.
After having seen quite a few cat videos, I´d like to put them in 4 categories. They attract attention because the depicted…
- … cats behave in an abnormal way, like cats that are barking or bathing.
- … cats imitate human behaviour.
- … baby kittens have this heartbreaking cuteness bonus and often behave a little clumsy.
- … cats fail their aim, e.g. the object they want to jump on to.
Each type of video leaves an impression, the watcher is either surprised, entertained or moved. Many people can´t get enough of these videos because the cute, astonishing or entertaining clips make them forget their own problems and help them being lazy for a while. Oh, I saw that the latest cat video was posted just a few minutes ago. I think, I can watch some more before I accomplish my to-do-list for today…
