or, Cute Cats of the World Unite
I’ve assigned The Cute Cat Theory of Internet Activism to my Time Arts class this semester as a reading. Ethan Zuckerman presented it as a talk in 2008 about the way that activists use social media and about the way censoring activists leads to the death of many cute lolcats as collateral damage, which thereby leads to greater awareness of what the activists are fighting for.
I was re-reading it so that we could talk about it in class and I wanted to see how the Cute Cat Theory holds up in light of the recent democratic revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East. So how does it hold up? It is just about the smartest take on the Internet I’ve ever seen. I had forgotten that many of the examples he used were from Tunisia and Egypt. This was back in 2008! The Cute Cat Theory really did predict the future. Far from needing revising, it needs to be held up as the key to the secret of the Internets.
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