Speaker: Zhou Runan, Associate Professor, School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-sen University

Hello everyone, I am an anthropologist, mainly studying humans. What about humans? This is to study the three questions that security guards ask you when you come to this theater: Who are you? where are you from? What are you doing here?

Anthropologists will use methods and perspectives such as cultural research, comparative research, and field research to study interesting people and things that people may not normally touch, so as to reflect on the value and meaning of their lives. Such as research on sex workers, research on gender-diverse communities, research on ethnic minority areas, etc.

My doctoral dissertation is about the drug problem in a minority area. Through long-term coexistence with drug-related communities, think about the structural changes and their consequences in the multidimensional relationship between the state and society, Han and minority nationalities, cities and villages, markets and culture, and men and women during the social transformation process.

Today we will enter a small topic, which is also a topic that everyone is paying more attention to recently, about Cloud sucking cats or Cloud raising cats .

Why is there such a problem? Why is there such a group of people?

Because many people think that it ’s too difficult to raise cats in reality, I slipped away, I ca n’t keep them at home, and I do n’t have time.

But there is a way for you to connect with cats—cloud cats, I claim a cat online. For example, I followed our Jiani (Portal: I have kept a cat for so long, do you really understand it? ) , watch her every day We’ll be very happy with tinkering with cats there.

Today we will discuss this interesting phenomenon: Why does cloud sucking cat become the mainstream habit of young people today?

MySome students are already after 00. Before I came here, I said, I want to talk about why cloud sucking cats have become the mainstream of young people? They told me that cloud sucking cats are no longer mainstream, and we now have cloud sucking cats, mainly pandas, and cloud sucking lizards, cloud sucking turtles, and cloud sucking mice. All kinds of sucking … I can’t keep up.

However, as an anthropologist, I try to understand a phenomenon I don’t know much about: How did the cloud sucking cat become the mainstream culture of young people as I understand it? It is roughly divided into the following sections:

Understanding “cloud sucking cat”, there are several steps to take

In the first part, we first ask a question: how do we live in the everyday world every day, and how cloud sucking cats become a symbolic practice and become the physical and mental experience of our youth as individuals, and present a An ideological practice?

Ask a question

There are actually two concepts behind my question.

First of all, what is a cloud sucking cat? It refers to people watching our Jiani on the Internet every day, watching pictures or videos of cats sent by her, thus replacing the behavior of raising cats in real life. ThisBehavior, how should we explain.

Second, the research method I use is called virtual ethnography. Even I also pay attention to Jiani’s vibrato. Every day I watch her videos and also read the messages of netizens. I also go to those microblogs, such as some cat bloggers. Chat with them, why are you following her? What is your main concern? Collect data in this way. Using a virtual ethnographic approach, I present some of my findings.

In the second part, I want to talk to you about the brief history of cat breeding in the cloud. We all know that cat breeding must be shoveled, but in fact sometimes it is necessary to “pick up shit” (A Brief History) .

Let me show you a few sets of figures. According to CNN’s figures in 2015, there are 6.5 billion pictures and videos of cats circulating on the global Internet. What is the concept? One for each person.


“Meng is justice”

Youtube data for 2014 show that there are more than 2 million cat videos and 26 billion people watch cats. This number is definitely multiplied by a geometric multiple today. There were 2.1 billion Weibo content on cats on Weibo in 2017. So from the data point of view, it has indeed become a fashion, mainstream, and become our mainstream culture today.

But when it was born, it was actually very niche. According to the brief history of Yunchi Cats, the earliest group of very weird people-geeks-actually represented some small circles of geeks by publishing some pictures of cats or dogs on the Internet.

So cat’s pictures first became popular on the Internet. It is a small circle phenomenon, or subculture, which is actually used to fight and resist, and to provoke and ridicule mainstream popular culture.

But it is very ironic that today, the cloud-raised cat has become a mainstream popular culture of the masses, and what they resist eventually becomes themselves.

Let ’s see how it happens:


How cats rule the Internet

Cats began to rule the Internet, which actually took about 10 years. Starting in 2007, Cat’s emoji packs began to attack the city on a large scale on the Internet. We noticed that the Internet emoticons are now divided into two genres, one is the Mengmen pie represented by cats, and the other is the “middle-aged and elderly emoticon packs” that cannot be extricated daily.

In the United States, there is even a sect called Cat Worship. In 2015, the Moving Image Museum in New York held an exhibition “How Cats Rule the Internet”, which showed the history of cats occupying the Internet by means of film and television. This is a time linear understanding of cats dominating the Internet.

Frankly, I am constantly learning about the brief history of the Internet, and all of you here may already be familiar with it. Because I was a post-80s immigrant from the Internet age, we did n’t have the Internet when we were young. As the aborigines of the new media era, the post-90s and post-00s may know a lot more online buzzwords than we do.

“Cloud raising cats” around

Let’s watch the first cloud cat concept around cats. I think of a scene: sometimes walking on the street at night, suddenly someone patted your shoulder, brother, I have a cat (mao) Do you want Of course, a cat movie here refers to a video or a still picture of a cat.

The second is called Sucking Cat. What is Cat Sucking? Cat sucking is actually a conversion word for smoking an addictive item. It refers to the action of expressing love for cats, including kissing the cat, holding it high to hug or even holding it hard to sniff, showing that it is cat A desire for films. There is also the gesture of tortoise cat’s finger touching, kneading and caressing.

In fact, although we seem to be studying cats, in fact, we are studying those young people who raise cats in the cloud. I divided cat’s Internet image into three types:

The first is called a healer.

Let ’s watch an interview: She said, “I ’m very relaxed when I watch cat movies. For example, when I ’m doing an experiment to end a break, I will stare at the screen when I play mobile phone before bed. When you are tired or depressed, get a relief.

Cat as a Healer

So cats are human comforters. The cat image is particularly beautiful, cute, and cute. Although some of its behavior may express concepts and signals that it annoys you, it is not important-“What matters is not what the cat thinks, but I think”. I think it’s so cute, I still want to sting it, the cat can cure me.

For example, you were criticized by the boss in the office. For example, if you do n’t crowd the bus today, you are late for work and bring a series of negative emotions in your life. When you face a cute cat, everything seems to be troubled. The city disappeared.

The second is the same. In fact, we know that in terms of psychology, many people like similar things. Human psychology has a kind of psychological mapping and refraction of similarity.

How can cats and humans be identified in daily life? Let’s start with an interview: she said that she likes to be independent like a cat. (Maverick seems to be a pig? In fact, a cat is also a maverick animal.) I also want to be like a cat, on my own Mood, loved ones when you like them, ignore them when you don’t like them, you don’t need to cater to other people’s thoughts.


Cat as a kind

There is a saying in the pet industry called cold cats and hot dogs. Cats are always cold, as if cats are our masters, not we are their masters. Exactly who is the master, the longer we keep cats, the more confusion may arise. After all, as a liquid animal, the cat may have ruled the earth for many years. This is the second kind of refraction with the cat’s image.

The third is that cats are heroes, and they are heroes in daily life. Heroes are needed in daily life, because our life is too boring, too bland, and too lonely, we need to have something beyond, just like we like Marvel, we must find a consignment, Cats are such a thing.

And it creates a kind of contrast. In reality, I just keep it up. For example, if you face the boss with a smile on your face and MMP, you would like to leave the boss with a slap in your face and say that I’m quitting, but in many cases I may feel it and endure it. So you think it ’s good to be a cat. It can fan over its master at any time, but the master still wants to buy cat food for him. As an object of extraordinary worship beyond everyday life, we will feel that cats are really the ideal type of my life, and I want to live like it.

Cat as a hero

But in daily life, I ca n’t be like this, so I kneel, lick and worship cats. So cat worship was born. This is the emergence of the third image of a cat as a hero. Of course, there are many other types, and we can dig deeper together.

Next we enter a somewhat serious academic discussion. I propose a concept called Involution of the spiritual world . The concept of involution was first derived from the study of rural by Gerz, an anthropologist.

What do you mean? for example. For example, if a village has more people and less land, if one acre of land can produce about 300 kilograms of rice, you will find that one person can produce 300 kilograms of land per acre. Ten times, twenty times the energy, manpower, material resources, and financial resources are on an acre of land, but the rice harvest it produces will not be multiplied by 10 times by 20 times, and it will not produce a corresponding output ratio based on your input. This is called diminishing marginal effect in the economic sense. I borrow the word to describe the spiritual world of our contemporary young people.


Inner world scrolling

Of course, when I discussed this important “theoretical discovery” with my students, they sent me a glance and said, “Teacher Zhou, you think too much, we young people are fine.”

I said, “Your daily world has been introverted according to my worrying thoughts. According to macro-sociology research, the world is experiencing a large number of structural gaps between the rich and the poor, as well as social differentiation, and it is called society Stratification. “

I will tell you a little story. When I was walking with a friend on a road, a red sports car Ferrari flew by. A moment later, my friend came from a civilian like me. Envious cars are so envious. My friend also said, “I want to work hard, and one day I will buy one.”

I patted him on the shoulder to wake him up: “Some things weren’t available when I was born, I’m afraid they’ll be gone in this life.”

I don’t know if you have such a deep sense of despair in your hearts? Sometimes your life’s struggle can’t reach the starting point of others.

Zhou Runan is creating the scene of the Remix conference

So in the face of the slowdown of the upward movement of the social class and the cruel reality of the structural solidification of the social class, even if we work hard, we may not be able to reach the social structural position where some people were born. Begin to roll in. Everyone can imagine a scene, like constantly cutting wood like an axe, slowly its blades rolled up. We think, what use is this? Then there was a state of life filled with a lot of nothingness, which I called the involution of the spiritual world.

Under the high-speed operation of modern society, fierce competition, and multiple pressures, our individuals are living in a certain state of life in a certain sense, and a lazy mentality called consumption has emerged. This can explain some concepts that were once popular among young people, such as “mourning.” Everyone likes to drink hi tea. In fact, there is a very popular tea called funeral tea. It will not irrigate chicken soup. Of course, the essence of it is chicken soup. In my opinion, it is poisonous chicken soup. such asIt tells you that you won’t have nothing! At least you’re still sick; you won’t encounter love at the corner, you’ll only encounter beggars. Let ’s take a look at some of these sentences. It ’s sour!

So I think that this involution of the spiritual world has become the structural root of the social mentality of the cloud cat breeding phenomenon. Source -these two things At first glance it doesn’t matter, but anthropologists can pull them together.

The cloud-raising cat has also become a rolling presentation and solution path in the spiritual world, that is, When I can’t change the world, I have to turn to him and find a delicate gadget One’s own spiritual sustenance.

So in my opinion, raising cats in the cloud is such a way of self-salvation. But after all, it is a weapon for the weak. In the face of more and more empty nest youths and individualized life trends, some people say that it is better to keep cats in love, drink cats, and cats in bars than anything. Cats.

At this time we are facing another trap, the big pit, called the Consumerism Trap . Because you like cats, I will continue to construct and stimulate your needs:

You must have a real cat, even if you are raising a cat in the cloud, but this cat has some surroundings. Would you like to know about its bag? Want to know about its lipstick? Want to know about its body scent perfume?


The endless stream of cat peripheral products

Merchants generate a lot of surroundings, which stimulates consumption and further exacerbates our social anxiety. Originally we wanted to use it as a channel for social anxiety relief, but instead used it by consumerism as a source of anxiety.

Of course, from a positive perspective, it will indeed become our social currency today. We young people are often just talking awkwardly, and we have nothing to talk about. It’s interesting to talk about the hot news that happened recently, and talk about raising cats in the cloud. This has become a social currency.

So some people do n’t really like cats, they do n’t know cats, and they have no interest in understanding cats, but I pretend to know them well. A little talk about resources and common topics.

With the disappearance of community and offline social capital, the alienation of interpersonal relationships, but the main topic of interest has become an interesting reason for us to approach it. This is the second layer of analysis.

We also have one last critical thinking. When we raised cats in the cloud, there was a new round of alienation in the relationship between people and things, just like the commercial propaganda we talked about. With the popularization of cats, its products and brands have more symbolic and symbolic meanings. After repeated guidance and promotion by marketing, the demand for cloud-raised cats has been created, and more and more people have been invisible. Among the cats in the cloud.

The cat ’s symbolic consumption has become a source of self-expression and meaning, but what kind of effect it will bring, our conclusion is quite pessimistic:

Cloud raising cats actually reflects whenThe mentality, emotions, and subcultures of urban young people in the pre-social transition period also deeply affected the structural process and reconstruction of modern society.

Okay, to sum it up. Today we actually talked about three issues:

First, who are you? That is why cats have become a kind of cloud-raising phenomenon today?

Second, where are you from? We re-examined how cat breeding from a niche subculture has become the mainstream culture of mass consumption today.

Third, what are you doing? We present three images and functions of cats on the Internet. We see that in fact, the more important phenomenon of cloud cat breeding is that it reflects the deep social structure of the spiritual world of young people in our daily lives. The cloud cat is actually the weapon of the weak who is tens of millions of empty nest youths in China. Some rebellious actions that we cannot do in the real world, such as facing your boss, you dare not resist the capital, you have to rely on an ethereal utopian cloud cat, this is a solace and self-image Mapping a symbol.

Building the Remix Conference Scene

We try to bring self-satisfaction and social satisfaction through cloud-raising cats, so as to produce a kind of pleasure, to alleviate the alienation of people in our daily lives, and to reshape people’s subjectivity.

But because of this satisfaction and joy, it is full of escapism and fictitiousness to our lives. In the end, it is inevitable to slip unconsciously into the consumption trap created by nihilism and consumerism, resulting in new alienation.

We have nowhere to escape. This is a pessimistic conclusion.

So, finally, if you ask an anthropologist what it means to raise a cat in the cloud? I tell you nothing, but it is very interesting. This is the topic I am creating today to share with you.

Finally, we still need a little critical thinking. When we are talking about raising cats in the cloud, you have to think, what do we want to achieve? Of course, you can choose not to think, as long as you think it is interesting and can make you happy, then right, then do it!