Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos
Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos
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猫知道它们统治 YouTube 吗？
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发表时间：
2014
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通讯作者：
Radha O’Meara
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作者：
Radha O’Meara
你看过那些猫跳进盒子里、攻击打印机或试图从积雪的汽车上跳下来的视频吗？随着在互联网上观看视频的可用性和受欢迎程度在过去十年中迅速上升，猫视频的流行也是如此。虽然YouTube上猫视频的可爱可能会让它们显得轻浮，但事实上，它们的核心是一个重大的讽刺：在线猫视频使企业能够监视观众，但观众似乎和视频中的猫一样对此视而不见。
为此，我认为当代猫视频的显着特点，特别是侧重于他们的叙事结构和观察模式。我将猫的视频与早期电影的“惊奇美学”和狗的视频进行比较，以探索惊险和猫表演的观赏关系。特别是，我强调了这些视频的一个独特的特点：猫的无意识。我认为，这在一个由监视主导的消费文化中是罕见的，我们不断意识到被监视的可能性。在线视频中猫的无意识给观众带来了两种主要的乐趣：想象摆脱监视的可能性，以及体验管理监视的力量。然而，最终，猫视频使观众能够方便我们自己的监视，我们这样做的喜悦放弃一只小猫跳在纸巾盒
Did you see the videos where the cat jumps in the box, attacks the printer or tries to leap from the snowy car? As the availability and popularity of watching videos on the Internet has risen rapidly in the last decade, so has the prevalence of cat videos. Although the cuteness of YouTube videos of cats might make them appear frivolous, in fact there is a significant irony at their heart: online cat videos enable corporate surveillance of viewers, yet viewers seem just as oblivious to this as the cats featured in the videos.
Towards this end, I consider the distinguishing features of contemporary cat videos, focusing particularly on their narrative structure and mode of observation. I compare cat videos with the “Aesthetic of Astonishment” of early cinema and with dog videos, to explore the nexus of a spectatorship of thrills and feline performance. In particular, I highlight a unique characteristic of these videos: the cats’ unselfconsciousness. This, I argue, is rare in a consumer culture dominated by surveillance, where we are constantly aware of the potential for being watched. The unselfconsciousness of cats in online videos offers viewers two key pleasures: to imagine the possibility of freedom from surveillance, and to experience the power of administering surveillance as unproblematic. Ultimately, however, cat videos enable viewers to facilitate our own surveillance, and we do so with the gleeful abandon of a kitten jumping in a tissue box