Applied Arts Guest Editor
The Internet is Made of Cats
Did cats ruin the economy? Probably! We explored this controversial topic in full in the Jacknife guest editorial of Applied Arts magazine.
My first foray into opinion writing was this satirical piece on the effect of cat videos on productivity. While the scientific methodology is suspect at best and tongue was planted firmly in check, the underlying message on the invasion of technology into our lives and the effect it has on our ability to concentrate remains a topic of interest for me. The article is peppered with footnotes interrupting the experience and recreating the disruptive effect technology has.
From the masthead:
"The Distraction Issue
The editorial content contained in the following pages explores the nature of our increasingly near-constant state of distraction. We used to have vibrant inner lives filled with real wonder and tragedy. Now we wonder if Instagram can really help us decide what to have for lunch and the mere thought of dropping a mobile device in a toilet is a disaster of unparalleled horror.
The previous 67 words is a first draft that took the author two hours and 35 minutes to write. During that time he completed 2 quizzes, read 5 listicles, responded to 5 emails and 2 text messages, ordered a book on successful habits from Amazon (Prime, free same day shipping) and checked what time it was time twice."
(Full text of the article below the photos)
Cover design by Jan Avendano
I worked closely with longtime co-worker and friend, Jan Avendano, in a creative direction capacity, but as anyone who knows Jan will attest, she needed very little of it. Her choice of clickbait and cat video-inspired visual language perfectly communicates our current reality.
Table of contents (design by Jan Avendano)
Opening spread of article by yours truly (design by Jan Avendano)
This work was completed at Jacknife.
Full text from the article. For the full intended effect, please scroll to the footnotes at the bottom as you encounter them. It's a long read, but an entertaining and informative one. I promise you will not be disappointed:
How Cats Ruined the Economy
by Adam MacLean
Associate Creative Director, Jacknife
Warning: The sensationalist clickbait-style headline for this article is admittedly a bit misleading. While it will use “figures” and “statistics” in order to demonstrate that cats have a negative impact on productivity and are, in fact, the destructive forces for evil that many of us have suspected they were all along, that math is at best, problematic and at worst, completely devoid of any real analytical value. (1) (2)
We’ll get to the cats, but first let’s address the underlying force that unites the funny cat video, the email alert, and which celebrity was spotted out in public wearing something you totally won’t believe (3): distraction. Distraction is the secret source of the cat video’s power. We are fully distracted on a 24/7 basis. Researchers say we check our smartphones an average of 150 times a day. That’s about once every three waking minutes. (4) We spend most of our waking hours staring at a screen to the point that we probably don’t even blink that many times in a day. We can’t go to the washroom without our phones or even drive our cars without sending text messages which, seriously? (5) But it’s not just our phones. Our work environments are pulsating anthills of activity. Bouncing dock icons, software updates, vibrating smartphones and tropical destinations reminding us that we’d rather be anywhere other than where we currently are. Like on a beach somewhere, staring at our phones. Our desktops are littered with forgotten browser tabs layered over chat dialogues, server directories, tweet decks and with any luck, some actual work. We are active participants in our own distraction and apart from the occasional passing comment by that person at work no one really likes to “lay off the Crackberry for a while,” (6) we don’t really seem to mind.
Buzzfeed, which has perfected the art of clickbait, has capitalized on our unwillingness to maintain anything beyond goldfish-calibre focus, passing $100 million in revenue for 2014 and birthing an entire industry of distraction entertainment (7). The incentive to click through to content on any of these sites is often sensational and misleading. The content is shallow, poorly written and spread out over as many pages as possible to maximize ad revenue. The experience itself is deeply unsatisfying, which, as we’ll see, is almost certainly the point. So why are sites like this so profitable and gaining in popularity?
The culprit, according to University of Michigan professors Berridge and Robinson, is dopamine. Once thought to be a pleasure releasing neurotransmitter, Berridge and Robinson say that dopamine instead causes the seeking of pleasure, followed by the release of opioids in the brain causing a swell of satisfaction. The problem occurs when satisfaction isn’t achieved (and often even when it is), and the seeking behaviour continues. This is called a dopamine loop. It’s the reason many vices are so addictive and it’s also the reason why content generated by the Buzzfeeds and Upworthys of the world is likely more effective at keeping you clicking when it’s not particularly good. (8)
It is in this behaviour where we see Marshall McLuhan’s most enduring thesis, “the medium is the message,” fully crystallized. Who amongst us hasn’t found themselves pulling their phone out of their pocket only to find, after several moments of popping in and out of apps, that there’s no goal in mind? (9) The mere thought of losing our phones triggers panic. (10) In McLuhan’s world and in ours, the content is not important. However, the medium delivering it is because it changes our behaviour and how we interact with others. The Grumpy Cat meme received from a co-worker isn’t the transformational part of the exchange; the internet is. We hungrily consume, distribute and deconstruct endless streams of content while ignoring the deleterious effects, both socially and economically, of the media that delivers it.
The social impact is apparent and yet, easily dismissible as esoteric hand-wringing: increased post-modern isolation, cognitive overload, increasingly acceptable anti-social behaviour and the blurring of work/life boundaries. The idea of a dollar figure associated with the economic impact of distraction, particularly in the workplace, is more concrete but difficult to accurately quantify due to the relative lack of research on the matter.
But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try. And in order to contextualize it even further, we’ll frame it in terms of financial losses specifically due to cat-related content.
So, finally, mercifully, just how much did cats (who are the embodiment of evil, let’s not forget), cost employers using completely-unreliable-to-the-point-of-anecdotal statistical techniques and data sets? I turn first to the gatekeeper of rigorously-procured cat statistics, Friskies, who it should be noted maintains a website dedicated to ranking the world’s 50 Most Influential Cats. (11) As of 2013, Friskies, via actual news organization CBS, estimated that 15% of all internet traffic was cat-related. That seems like a lot. And it is. But, according to Net Net Traffic in just 12 months, that number exploded to 27%. This data seems somehow less reliable than Friskies, which is by no means an internationally-recognized research juggernaut, so let’s proceed with the more conservative 15%.
Analysis of distraction in the workplace is even more difficult to come by. The most frequently cited number puts losses of productivity due to workplace distraction for U.S. employers at 650 billion USD in 2008. With the explosion of social media and proliferation of mobile devices, it’s safe to assume that this number is extremely conservative by today’s standard. Even so, it represents a full 4.4% of the GDP for the United States in 2008. (12) If we allow for a modest increase in 2013 to 700 billion USD and factor in our Friskies 15%, we get a rather astonishingly large result of 105 billion USD in lost productivity due to cat-related distraction in the U.S. alone. That is more than the GDP of the vast majority of countries in the world. (13)
Even a single cat video could have a surprisingly large negative impact on global productivity. Take the adorably-titled “Many Too Small Boxes and Maru.” This video features Japanese cat-celebrity Maru in his most popular video by view count on YouTube, racking up a breathtaking 224 million views. To make a case on impact of this video, we have to determine a dollar amount associated with each view and how many of those views were likely made during work hours. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the average global annual income after adjusting for currency and cost of living is 18000 USD. Assuming a 40 hour work week and two weeks of vacation, the average global wage is $9 per hour or 15¢ per minute. At this point, we have to make some pretty big assumptions. Let’s assume that on average we spend 112 waking hours each week (16 hours each day) and that 35% of those hours are spent at work (eight hours each day, five days a week). Now let’s assume that half of the views for this video were made by non-contributors to the global economy: children, the unemployed and the elderly. That makes the number of views during work hours 39.2 million. At 2 minutes and 57 seconds long, workers of the world spent 115,640,000 minutes watching Maru trying to fit into many boxes that are absurdly too small for him. (14) That means employers spent 17,346,000 USD on workers watching Maru trying to fit into many boxes that are absurdly too small for him. Again, this is hardly rigorous statistical work here but would the result be any less astonishing if it were ten million dollars? Five million?
That money spent on lost productivity doesn’t just wholly vanish into the ether. A frequently-cited 2010 quote from MetaFilter user blue_beetle sums up the current state of free content perfectly: “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” (15) All those free cat videos represent a parasitic transfer of wealth, in the form of ad dollar-generating page views and view counts, from employers to the distraction entertainment industry, the Buzzfeeds, the Upworthys and YouTubes. A transfer of wealth that could result in a depression of employment numbers, increased retail costs and smaller returns for investors. And it is significantly facilitated by cats.
So, yes, cats are bad for the economy and likely evil. Even those of us who didn’t want it to be true likely suspected it deep down inside. It seems the only way to stop them is to avoid where they live as much as possible: the internet. (16) They can’t live without our attention. Without our page views, they wither. The only way forward is through careful vigilance. Limit the cues to distraction in your life and most importantly –hang on, email. Sorry, I’ve got to take this.
Footnotes
(1) Fear not. There are plenty of other perfectly legitimate reasons to hate cats other than being Goldman-Sachs-esque-world-economy-crashers. Just off the top of my head: litter boxes, they only pay attention to you when they want something, the way they always put their butt in your face, keyboard appropriation and a parasite called toxoplasma gondii that may or may not exert a certain amount of mind control (!), cause schizophrenia and yet is so common it’s mere mention induces yawning amongst the scientific community.
(2) Clearly most of the blame for ruining the economy still belongs to a corrupt global political system and free-market fetishists.
(3) I’m going to save you some time from clicking that article: it’s Kim Kardashian and honestly, you would probably believe it.
(4) Source: Locket
(5) Literally, get off my lawn.
(6) This guy, amirite? We get it. Crack cocaine is addictive. Blackberry was a type of phone our ancestors used to use. You’re not funny.
(7) Distractotainment?
(8) So yes, cat videos, especially when relatively short or not very good, are addictive.
(9) Don't lie.
(10) Of course it does. It’s a terrifying prospect, rivalled only by visions of dropping a phone in a toilet, which for me is less of an ‘if’ and more of a ‘when’.
(11) It’s called friskies50.com. Naturally, renowned feline curmudgeon Grumpy Cat is the current number 1, followed by Japanese cat-shaped demigod, Maru. I’m not sure what exactly qualifies as influence for a cat, perhaps it’s the ability to completely marginalize a local dog community, outlaw Mondays or pass legislation with mandatory minimums on lasagna-based meals. But it’s clear that if this list was judged on unsurpassed zeal toward cardboard boxes, Maru would be ranked numbers 1 through 20. He loves them.
(12) The 2008 U.S. GDP 14.72 trillion USD according to the World Bank.
(13) According to Wikipedia, List of Countries by GDP. You just need to scroll through the list to notice that there is far more after 105 billion than there are before it.
(14) What are you doing Maru? Even a less *ahem* ample cat would have trouble fitting into those boxes. I am incredulous yet charmed by your moxy!
(15) *cough Facebook *cough
(16) As I understand it, in-person, cats pose very little risk to your well-being. Although, why risk it? You might have allergies.
