Why a cat is easy to spread?

With the base on the well-known ‘Keyboard cat’ (a cat that can play the piano wearing a fashion T-shirt and doing funny faces at the same time), we are going to analyze the main characteristics that make a video of a cat turning into a famous video: easy to spread on the Internet and easy to find everywhere. For this, we are going to use the characteristics of a meme described by Richard Dawkins (I spoke about this a few days before in another post): longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity.

This video starts on December 2007 but is in a few months ago, June 2009, when explodes with 3,141,919 views. Then, it generates a lot of different activities related on it: twitter with 6.000 followers,  on another web page you can buy T-shirts and cups with the Keybord cat on it, papercraft activities with the drawing of the same cat and a lot of media reports about it.

Of course, copies are important in this point. There are a lot of copies about this video, but not based on real fidelity. The people copy it changing the meaning of the first video. They create remix videos about fear, nostalgia, videos that express any awkward or painful situation and even video games! Easy copies, but with not exactly the same meaning. This is a really good example on  The Daily Show of Jon Stewart.

Finally, why ‘Keyboard cat’ has achieved this fame?

On Time Magazine, we found an article written written on June 2009 that said that “These days, people only use the Internet to search for pictures of adorable animals. Unfortunately, most of them are cats.” This means that the only reason is because it is a cute cat. A cute and funny cat. And the people love it. At the end, on Internet you can find a lot of videos related with animals that have many viewers. In my opinion animals doing human activities like playing the piano, eat with a fork, dancing, etc. are easy to spread on Internet because people think they are cute because they have human behaviour.

Without forget Jenkins characteristics or qualities typical to succesful spreadable media, is important not lose the idea of humour. I think is another characteristic that make famous a video.

Internet could be a very potent weapon of communication. A weapon to change the perception of things. Internet gives us  the possibility to know all the planet earth with only a button switch on. However, many people enjoy watching Internet videos of cute cats. At the end it does not matter, because this point shows us that Internet is now a really free media in which you can find videos of cute cats, falls, babies, etc. All mixed with political criticism, independent analysis of history, digital media,…

But if you want a more deep analisis about ‘Keyboard cat’ don’t lose this good and funny video about it. It is really interesting and you can find other analisis with spreading ideas(memes) based on Youtube videos: