The Good, the Bad, and the Grumpy: Online Cat Pictures as Design Enigma in Digital Media

From feline celebrities to viral videos, online cat pictures as a twenty-first century populous digital genre have surmounted a vacantness from research interest insofar as to represent an undervalued digital phenomenon which this paper seeks to investigate from a digital philosophical perspective that defines the genre as to what Braden terms as ‘the Internet and cat videos by extension became this sort of de facto, virtual cat park.’ (Brooks, 2020) While there has been an evidential lack of interest into online cat pictures as a serious mode of investigation within an academic context, the discussions throughout will congeal three central themes that define first, that online cat pictures are a significant internet genre; second, that online cat pictures are an embodiment of kitsch as a social idiom; and thirdly, that design facilitates the impact of this genre through an embeddedness of human fascination to the aesthetic proliferation of feline habitual observation and mischief