Web culture | Why are cute animals triumphant on the web?

I scroll about tornadoes, about human lives which we pay little attention to, persists in drowning me in a flow of images. My race ends when I come across Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippopotamus who has been obsessing Internet users for several weeks. The animal becomes my lifeline and I like his photo as if his mischievous look could make my life more livable.

New muse of the web, Moo Deng has just been the subject of a sketch on the American show Saturday Night Live. The animal, which lives in captivity in a Thai zoo, has already attracted impressive media coverage, in addition to having inspired the creation of a cryptocurrency. It also propelled a “Moo Deng-style” makeup trend, a combination of gray eyeshadow and pink blush on which the Sephora company was quick to capitalize. It must be said that cute animals constitute an essential part of our digital ecosystem. But why?

Like many other baby animals, Moo Deng participates in what several researchers now call cute economyor “the cute economy”, a visual economy which involves the creation and circulation of touching images within a market where attention has become a prized resource.

Ghalia Shamayleh, assistant professor in marketing at ESSEC Business School, studied the economy of cuteness with Concordia University professor Zeynep Arsel. She explains to me that “when we talk about cute economya term coined in 2014 by researcher James Meese, refers not only to animals, but to anything that can be considered cute, such as babies or even cartoon characters.

The cute subject, because of his youthful features, is perceived as vulnerable. It then creates a relational link based on the care and empathy.

Moreover, according to the “child schema,” a theory by biologist Konrad Lorenz that Shamayleh talks to me about, stereotypical juvenile features like a chubby face and big eyes trigger an innate response in us: the desire to take care of each other.

For a habitable web

When I come across an animal cute online, I often take the opportunity to catch my breath, for example to chase away the war images that fill my news feed. For Shamayleh and for Jessica Maddox, social media expert and teacher at the University of Alabama, the production and circulation of cute images is also a way of cultivating joy, of making the web more ” habitable”. This form of escape would counterbalance the toxicity and negativity found online.

“Animal photos put forward a rather optimistic philosophy: we sometimes agree to take care of ourselves and our subscribers,” writes Maddox in the article “ The secret life of pet Instagram accounts: Joy, resistance, and commodification in the internet’s cute economy. When sending a photo of Moo Deng to my friend, for example, I let her know that I am thinking of her. The cute image then becomes a kind of visual sweet note that I dedicate to him.

The history of my conversations with my lover is, for example, studded with videos and photos of penguins and owls, species of birds around which we have slowly built our mythology together. Every time a penguin or an owl bursts into our conversations, the bird reactivates the uniqueness of our bond. Moo Deng and his acolytes thus allow couples of friends and lovers to develop a form of personalized communication, an emotional vocabulary shaped by common references. Within the cute economycute animals function as a social bond.

Malleable and apolitical

If Moo Deng circulates so fluidly on the web, it is also because the beast acts as a blank canvas on which everyone can project their fantasies. We can make the hippopotamus say whatever we want, since the beast is deprived of language. For companies that would like to ride on its popularity, the animal is particularly attractive, in that it seems rather harmless: “Moo Deng is not human, so she is less likely to create a scandal,” explains Ghalia Shamayleh. Apolitical, the hippo remains immune to missteps and cancel culture. It represents a brand image whose neutrality and malleability prove to be significant assets, particularly at a time when we are going through a noisy election year and when the horrors of war are increasing.

However, if Moo Deng was able to charm Internet users, it is not simply because of his appearance, but also because of his forbidding behavior. On several videos, we can catch her nibbling her caregiver’s leg or rearing up, as if she were rebelling or refusing a certain status quo. It seems that the beast manifests a discontent that many recognize themselves in, a precious rage that we should perhaps… take care of, especially if it rises to protect the most vulnerable.