An Unlikely History of the Internet Through Our Obsession With Cats

You have probably sent someone a cat meme because it reminded you of them, made you laugh, or conveyed an emotion you were trying to express. That habit has a surprisingly long history.

In the early 2000s, people started posting cat photos every Saturday, and Caturday became one of the internet’s first recurring traditions. When online video took off, cats became some of its first viral stars. Then memes arrived, and once again, cats were everywhere.

Long before any of this, Richard Dawkins had coined the word “meme” in 1976 to describe an idea that spreads from person to person, changing as it travels. The internet gave that process an entirely new scale. A joke could be copied, changed and passed between millions of strangers, with each person adding something to it and, in the process, creating a culture and an understood language between people who had never met. Today, entire communities are built around memes, constantly making their own versions and deciding which jokes survive.

Some of those jokes now have actual financial value. Dogecoin began as a meme and went on to become a cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars, while entire markets have since formed around coins built around internet jokes and the communities behind them. In this lecture, Dr. Peter Chow-White follows that history from Caturday and viral cat videos to memes and cryptocurrency, asking how something as ridiculous as a cat picture can become part of a shared culture, bring millions of strangers together and eventually become worth real money.

Peter Chow-White is a communication professor who has spent 25 years exploring how the Internet and data cultures impact the way we communicate and relate to one another. His recent research on memes and meme coins explores how internet jokes turn into communities and even cat-themed currencies. He is Director of the Gena Lab (Simon Fraser University) where scholarly and applied communication research engages industry, policy makers, and the news media around innovative digital and human solutions to improve organizations and society. He is also Professor of Computing Science and Business at SFU, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, and is a member of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge.

Agenda

6:00 PM doors open. Guests are welcome to arrive early, order drinks, and have dinner before the lecture begins.

7:00 PM lecture begins, followed by Q&A.

8:15 PM wrap up. Guests are welcome to stay for conversation and another drink.