The secret life of pet Instagram accounts: Joy,resistance,and commodification in the Internet’s cute economy

Abstract

A popular sentiment is that the Internet is for cute animal photos, but little has explored the visual cultures of pets and social media. The relationship between pets and social media is particularly prominent on Instagram, where pet owners often run Instagram accounts on behalf of their pets. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 23 individuals who run Instagram accounts for their pets, I discuss three dimensions of pet photos and social media: how individuals use pet Instagram accounts to curate a “fur baby” self-representation, the unspoken politics to sharing pet photographs online, and how individuals hope they provide followers joy. While joy and pet Instagram accounts are not solutions to the Internet’s problems, they do indicate how individuals work in ways to make platforms habitable. However, this joy is far from uncomplicated, as cultural dynamics of the Internet’s cute economy may problematize relationships between people, their pets, and their followers.

Keywords

Animals cute economy Instagram joy labor pets self-representation social media tactics

While it is colloquially understood that the Internet is for pictures of cute pets, literature on the visual cultures of pets and social media remains sparse. Animal photographs have been examined as memes, advertisements, and genre and group construction (Linné, 2016; Miltner, 2014; Shifman, 2013), but within these studies, animal photos are most often used to explore other social media practices. This study situates pet pictures in the foreground as the social media landscape is replete with these images, particularly on the photo-sharing platform Instagram. Leaver et al. (2020) note the popularity of pets on Instagram, be it through animal selfies or the sheer number of posts with animal-specific hashtags from breeders, rescue organizations, or people that simply love their pets. However, the cultural compulsion to engage in the mediated anthropomorphizing of pets is not new—historian Katherine Grier (2006) found in the 19th century, individuals wrote letters to each other in their pets’ voices, and in the early 20th century, individuals printed out photo plates of their furry companions to distribute. Pet Instagram accounts are the 21st-century manifestation of this, and I approach these accounts as distinct cultural practices in order to analyze images of pets as communicative social media actions.

Pet Instagram accounts are Instagram accounts run by humans on behalf of their pets. They involve anthropomorphizing one’s animal, as individuals post photos and captions, often from the pet’s perspective. These accounts are most often secondary Instagram accounts and only peripherally connected to the owner’s primary Instagram. Through in-depth interviews with 23 individuals who run Instagram accounts for their pets, I examine how pet practices functions on the photo-sharing site. While pet Instagram accounts exist on a continuum from amateur to professional influencers, this work specifically focuses on amateur pet Instagram accounts. Most of my participants had less than 100 followers. Only a few outliers in my interview participants had several hundred, and the most-followed account had 1000 followers.

Interviews uncovered three central social practices and meaning-making strategies at work in pet Instagram accounts. First, creating a pet Instagram and curating posts is a self-representational strategy. Through posting on their pet’s Instagram account, individuals revealed information about their pet, themselves, and themselves specifically as loving pet owners. Second, participants revealed pet Instagram accounts were often created to adhere to the unofficial politics of online pet photos. My participants divulged that while people may like seeing cute animals online, they do not want to repeatedly see one person’s specific animal. Decontextualized pets removed from their initial contexts are more popular than contextualized ones. Finally, many participants referred to pet Instagram accounts as a “pure” corner of the Internet and commented on the importance of spreading joy. For my participants, joyful pet Instagram accounts were in opposition to what they referred to as the toxicity, performativity, and negativity of social media.

While seemingly disparate findings, these insights are interlocking tenets that underscore complexities within the visual cultures of pet social media. Social media pets are ubiquitous but largely taken for granted, as demonstrated by the paucity of academic literature on the subject. Far from just being “cute distractions” (Chatfield, 2012), pet Instagram accounts show the nuances of joyful content in broader socioeconomic contexts. While my participants’ insights show pet Instagram accounts may be a way individuals work to make their favorite social media platforms habitable, these accounts are also imbricated within self-representation strategies and sharing politics. Far from being an “either/or” situation of “joy or toxicity,” pet Instagram accounts indicate the dialectical relationship between the two and show how social media’s visual pet cultures influence, and are influenced by, wider social and economic contexts.

Mediated pets

In the Anglophone world, scholars (Baker, 2001; Berger, 2009) attribute substantial shifts in human–pet relationships to the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution, in which considerable changes to work, leisure, disposable income, and urbanization meant humans no longer had to rely on animals for labor or food. Grier (2006) uncovered that the Industrial Revolution was also the time anthropomorphizing one’s pet through letters or photos became popular, indicating human, pet, and image relationships changed at this time as well. How people share pet images shows how a culture views pets, and this premise is key to John Berger’s work, Why Look at Animals? Berger (2009) argues looking relations surrounding pets offer insight into sociocultural trends. Regarding pet Instagram accounts, these insights come from analyzing how this long-standing cultural compulsion to anthropomorphize one’s pet manifests on specifically social media. To situate these pet Instagram accounts at this contemporary juncture, I first examine ways in which pet owners post about their pets online, and then I zoom out to examine pet social media more broadly, specifically within the Internet’s “cute economy.”

Pet owners on social media

My participants’ pet Instagram accounts are low stakes insofar as they are not professionals. To most pet owners, there is nothing “low stakes” about their animal, and individuals often have intense emotional attachments to their furry companions. Blouin (2013) explores these sentiments and identifies three orientations people may have toward pets: humanistic, in which pets are beloved companions; protectionistic, in which pets enjoy elevated status equivalent to humans and are considered deserving protection; and dominionistic, in which pets are viewed as below humans but useful. Individuals love pets across perspectives, but those who fall under humanistic are the most likely to adopt what Greenebaum (2004) refers to as the “fur baby” identity. The fur baby identity is a performance rooted in Erving Goffman’s impression management, as one adopting a fur baby identity may try to distinguish themselves from other pet owners and reinforce others’ views of themselves as a loving pet parent.

The fur baby identity shows how pets are used to reveal information about one’s self. Another such way is the creation and maintenance of a pet Instagram account, which can be a digital space to perform the fur baby identity. The tendency to use pets to express something about one’s self is not unique to Instagram, as individuals often use pets to construct digitally visual self-representations (Tiidenberg and Whelan, 2017). Belk (2013) also considers pets to be part of the extended self, in which other persons, places, and things constitute one’s sense of self. Pets are frequently cited parts of the extended self, and in the digital era, the extended self manifests online through images of other persons, places, things, or pets (Belk, 2013). Followers come to know what matters to someone based on the images they share. Therefore, a picture one posts of their pet often reveals information about the human owner, even if the human owner is absent from the photo. The human poster behind the image should not be forgotten, as it is an important link in the image’s chain of meanings. However, such a contextual link is often one of the most overlooked aspects as pet images circulate in the Internet’s “cute economy.”

Pet and animal images in the Internet’s cute economy

Pet and animal images are ubiquitous on social media, with dog “and cat photography play[ing] a huge role in the visual economy of the Internet” (Harper, 2016: 339). Such a visual economy is often referred to as a “cute economy” (Meese, 2014), and while pet and animal images are a substantial part of this culture, they are not the only type of material. Babies, mascots, cartoons, and animations can also be considered as part of the cute economy, but for purpose of this work, I focus on pet images. Pet images within the cute economy are driven by the cute aesthetic, which creates “a specific type of relationship between consumer subject and the (weak) cute object predicated on feelings of care and empathy” (Plourde, 2018: 297). When one engages with a cute image, feelings may relate to innocence or help for one that cannot help themselves. Regarding pet images, these pictures may create an indexicality of wanting to care for the animal in question.

An indexicality of care helps sustain the Internet’s cute economy, and it has certain positive implications for pets—in 2018, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) found social media has been a helpful tool for animal shelters, allowing them to increase public support and facilitate more adoptions (ASPCA, 2018). However, additional studies point out drawbacks. YouTube videos of endangered species and animals that should not be kept as pets are often cited as impetuses for people to pursue owning such animals (Nekaris et al., 2013). Similarly, the lack of context and education accompanying pet images means that while viewers may find certain behaviors cute (like a dog chasing its tail), the actions may actually indicate distress (Burn, 2011). Similarly, the cute economy is not exempt from looking relations, with the most notable being Black Dog Syndrome, the phenomenon that refers to how black dogs and cats are passed over for adoption in favor of lighter colored animals (Sinski et al., 2016). While Black Dog Syndrome predates social media, shelters across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom self-report that individuals specifically requesting any animal but a black one has increased in recent years, with people claiming black cats and dogs are “not photographable for social media” (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2018).

The cute economy is also intertwined with the entrepreneurial dynamics of social media. Lukacs (2015) argues that within neoliberalism, there is a relationship between the cute aesthetic and labor, and “cuteness” is a specific type of work used on social media to attempt to earn income. While Lukacs (2015) discusses how women perform cuteness as labor, previous discussions of the fur baby identity and the cute economy show how performing cuteness through pets can also be understood as a similar type of work. While cute is the defining aesthetic of the titular economy, it can also be a mechanism for achieving social, and even financial, capital. This complicates the cute economy by allowing it to simultaneously exist as a metaphorical cultural exchange and attempted actual financial transactions, thereby problematizing the cute aesthetics’ “purity” and “innocence.”

While cute is a predominant aesthetic and commonly associated with pet images, it is not the only affective practice at work. In addition to cuteness, this understanding also necessitates examinations of the affective stock individuals place in their pets, and such affection manifests through joy.

Pet images and joy

Joy emerged inductively as a predominant theme in my interviews. On one level, this is unsurprising, since Blouin’s (2013) pet orientations show individuals find varying levels of joy with their animals. However, on another level, there is much to unpack in conceiving of joy as a part of pet Instagram accounts. This section lays a foundation for thinking of joy as a cultural practice, not just within positivist, media effects, or sentiment analysis frameworks. I do this in order to one, provide a theoretical footing for what my participants described as important to them, and two, use it as a jumping-off point to further interrogate joy within pet Instagram accounts and the Internet’s cute economy.

I follow feminist scholar Lynne Segal’s (2017) writings on joy, in which she argues, “while nowadays we are encouraged to see happiness as something embedded within us, the type of euphoric happiness we call ‘joy’ takes us beyond or outside ourselves” (p. 24). Segal is less concerned with thinking of joy as a response to external stimuli and more as a result that comes from actively practicing happiness and existing in specific ways. This approach is grounded in the Aristotelian writings on happiness, in which “happiness (or eudaimonia) is not so much an emotion, a psychic state or inner disposition, but rather a way of acting in the world” (Segal, 2017: 16). While numerous scholars and philosophers have grappled with Aristotle’s conception of happiness, joy-as-practice ultimately comes back to culture, context, and community.

Animals and emotions such as joy are intertwined, and oftentimes, animal images are curated in ways that respond to human troubles. Berger (2009) notes this in Why Look at Animals?

We live in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose events do not conform to our Being, a world that has to be resisted . . . That we find a crystal or poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence. (p. 59)

This aesthetic Berger speaks of is the animal aesthetic, for in looking at animals one finds a beauty—or cuteness—that temporarily removes them from the industrialized world’s pressures. Joy and cuteness therefore have a dialogical relationship—one does not simply cause the other, but both are actively worked toward. For instance, on pet Instagram accounts, this may come from staging a photo in a particular way or sharing it with a certain caption. Because joy can be staged through certain photos or shared with certain captions, it can also be understood as practice of performative work, akin to the extended self and digitally visual self-representations. This does not negate the idea of joy-as-practice but shows how practicing joy is imbricated in larger, situational contexts. In this way, joy is work, and there is work that goes into sharing cuteness, beauty, and joy within animal images, and in Berger’s context, cultivating or finding joy in something is a social, moral, and philosophical act.

Finding joy is also political. Lu and Steele (2019) write on joy as resistance on social media, noting joy’s specific connections to Black communities in the United States. They argue joy is a purposeful practice that uses curated hashtags to respond to media stereotypes—in this case, hashtags like #carefreeblackkids promote joy despite mediated and systemic racism (Lu and Steele, 2019). Furthermore, Sarah Ahmed (2010) discusses how denying one’s joy is also a political act, specifically through her discussion of the “feminist killoy.” In pointing out complications of a topic, the feminist may prompt one to think more deeply, thus problematizing the joy. Segal (2018) expands this, pointing out “the desire to move outside and beyond one’s self, the search for some sort of shared laughter or joy, one with another, that ‘we-mode,’ is certainly one way of overcoming that gloom that can threaten to engulf us” (p. 25). Joy is worked toward when there are less than ideal circumstances, as individuals aim to move beyond circumstances that do not suit them, and they often do this work with others. However, just because joy helps one to resist less than ideal circumstances, it can never fully be divorced from said conditions.

My theorization of joy as resistance is largely rooted within the purview of cultural studies, in which “culture is not something people have, but something they do” (Johnson, 1986: 39). As noted, pets on social media, and particularly on Instagram, are some of the most ubiquitous yet overlooked visual practices within social media cultures. In this way, pet Instagram accounts emerge as exactly the type of ordinary, seemingly banal, and popular culture content and practices that are so fundamental to cultural studies. Within the everyday and the ordinary, there are numerous avenues of inquiry from which to examine how taken-for-granted assumptions permeate social life, have untapped potentials, and reify or challenge power structures (Turner, 2003).

Therefore, my intent in invoking Ahmed (2010) and Lu and Steele (2019) for understanding joy as resistance is not to render invisible the nuances of joy in communities that face serious marginalization, but rather lay a foundation for understanding the myriad ways joy is often an individual action in the face of material difficulties and structural inequalities. Stuart Hall (1996) often used a rather colorful, imaginary anecdote to describe what issues (or “interruptions”) of feminism and race did and brought to cultural studies, and how they could not be ignored. Feminism and race challenged the status quo in cultural studies and reconfigured what it meant to study the everyday by identifying how power structures are always present beyond the political. By situating pet Instagram accounts within this framework, I focus on social media users and their abilities to make digital spaces their own despite the numerous and often structural problems that permeate digital cultures. This follows Emily Van der Nagel’s (2018) work on forced algorithmic connections, in that individual social media users actively find ways to circumvent and resist structural actions by platforms.

In thinking through joy as resistance and the ways individuals work to resist the very social media platforms they inhabit, I define joy specifically as a tactic in De Certeau’s (2011) sense. Individuals are often savvy, agentic social media users, and they may find ways to circumvent a platform’s control or subvert its dominant trends and users. This may mean strategically maneuvering through platform affordances or carving out space for alternative practices and content. Scholars (De Ridder, 2015; Van der Nagel, 2018) discuss this social media maneuvering through De Certeau’s (2011) tactics, defined as “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus . . . the space of a tactic is the space of an other . . . it must play on and within a terrain imposed on it” (p. 37). Tactics emerge within the confines of their preexisting environment, but they are shrewd ways in which users make their environments “habitable.” This is necessarily the political dimension of everyday practices, as they come to resist dominant power structures.

The resistance Berger speaks of parallels the resistance de Certeau theorizes in making experiences habitable. Finding happiness and beauty where it may not be readily available is a resistant act, and animal images have a history of serving such a purpose. Therefore, attempting to cultivate joy within pet Instagram accounts can be understood as such a tactic and as attempts by individuals to make their social media experiences habitable. However, joy on pet Instagram accounts is a narrow stream within the platform’s larger cultural ecosystem, and such a tactic is not immune from surrounding contexts.

Joy and cuteness on Instagram

I theorize a relationship between pets and joy that takes place primarily on Instagram. Pet Instagram accounts take form within the photo-sharing site, and the platform’s structure shapes sociality in certain ways (Leaver et al., 2020; Van Dijck and Poell, 2013). For pet Instagram accounts, perhaps the most notable affordance is Instagram’s departure from their parent company’s “real name” policy; whereas Facebook allows individuals to have one profile, Instagram actively encourages users to create multiple accounts (Leaver et al., 2020). By prompting users to create several profiles, Instagram lets users easily segment off their content, as many do with ease in the creation of numerous profiles or “Finstas” (Fake + Instagrams; Leaver et al., 2020). When viewed in conjunction with de Certeau’s tactics, such maneuvers show how social media users work to make circumstances their own.

In the case of pet Instagram accounts, individuals seek out ways to make Instagram habitable. Like those who make Finstas to privately share content, pet Instagram accounts are a space to share pet pictures with a typically small number of followers. However, as discussions of the cute economy show, pets are not what is counter to the Internet’s dominant trends and uses. But cultivating a section of Instagram to be for pet photos, with the end-oriented, purposeful, “we-mode” of joy, is sometimes counter to the luxury, micro-celebrity, influencers, and problematic authenticity that populates the site (Marwick, 2015). Therefore, joy-as-resistance regarding pets and Instagram is situated within how individual social media users may use one platform vernacular to challenge another. Platform vernaculars, as defined by Gibbs et al. (2015), are ways of understanding how communication and cultural practices “emerge from the ongoing interactions between platforms and users” (p. 257). Numerous platform vernaculars can exist concurrently on social media, as users and uses are never monoliths. Curating spaces of Instagram to be for nothing but cute pictures of pets is one platform vernacular and, according to my participants, exists in opposition to the platform vernacular of influencer culture, multi-level marketing schemes, and negativity. This is a cultural practice maneuver to try to populate spaces of Instagram with cute and wholesome content, as opposed to what my participants identified as faux-perfection, influencers, politics, and toxicity.

However, while pet Instagram accounts can be a joyful tactic to carve out a niche space on the photo-sharing site, they are also never divorced from the Internet’s cute economy. While de Certeau’s tactics and Gibbs et al.’s (2015) conception of platform vernaculars are useful for theorizing the joyful intentions of many pet Instagram account users, my participants’ responses show how pet Instagram accounts have potential for resistance, but they are also constantly imbricated in broader cultural dynamics, cute economies, and actual economies. In terms of thinking through tactics, this means thinking of pet Instagram accounts as joy and cultural dynamics and economies, not joy or cultural dynamics and economies.

Method

This article draws upon in-depth interviews with 23 individuals who run Instagram accounts for their pets. Participants were initially recruited through public social media posts on my own Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with relevant hashtags such as #DogsOfInstagram, #CatsofInstagram, and #PetsOfInstagram used to reach potential individuals; snowball sampling was then used to recruit subsequent participants. My participants ranged in age from 19 to 57 years old, and occupations included, but were not limited to, an academic dean, a stay at home mom, a film festival coordinator, a pharmacist, a mechanical engineer, a personal trainer, a public relations specialist, and a US Navy lieutenant. Women were greatly overrepresented in the sample (n = 19), a trend that may reflect larger social media usage disparities (Smith and Anderson, 2018), as well as the tendency for women to be more likely to adopt a version of the “fur baby” identity (Greenebaum, 2004). Participants were located in the United States (n = 19), the United Kingdom (n = 3), and Australia (n = 1). Across my 23 interview participants, there were 18 dogs, 10 cats, 1 horse, 1 rabbit, and 1 bearded dragon. Humans and pets were both given pseudonyms to protect their identities.

As previously discussed, all of my research participants were considered “amateurs” and these accounts “low-stakes” in the sense they were not pet influencers. Studying pet influencers—a worthwhile topic for future research—would involve considerations of numerous different themes, including situating these accounts within influencer and micro-celebrity studies. This would also involve situating professional and famous pet Instagram accounts within a different historical trajectory than what I have outlined here and would consist of animal performances within circuses, zoos, aquariums, and theme parks. Therefore, my choice in recruiting “amateurs” was deliberate and made in order to focus on the ubiquity and everydayness of pets on social media within the view of cultural studies.

Interviews were conducted over Skype and phone calls, as well as in-person when possible. Interviews lasted anywhere from 30 to 50 minutes and followed a semi-structured protocol. Discussion questions and topics included, but where not limited to, how individuals arrived at the decision to make an Instagram for their pet, the logistics of creating an account, thoughts on Instagram, and what they hoped followers got out of the account. I transcribed the interviews myself, using an inductive approach to identify recurring words, themes, and ideas that manifested in discussion in order to connect them back to theory. This process was a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 2000) that allowed me to move from concrete realities to thematic and conceptual understandings of my data. Referencing the literature on pets, joy, the cute economy, and tactics, I categorized the data according to emerging themes: the relationship between self-representation and humanistic pet ownership, the politics of pet photos on social media, pet photos as joy, and complications of joy in Instagram’s broader culture.

Findings

Self-representation and humanistic pet ownership

During interviews, participants divulged information related to the extended self and humanistic pet ownership. Sarah mentioned, “Sure, I follow dog Instagrams where I don’t know the owner. But there’s an added element when you know the animal or you’ve met the owner, so you can understand the connection a bit more.” Sarah’s comments reflect the idea of the extended self—even though her friend was not pictured, she was still able to think of what the friend was experiencing through the puppy’s image. Jennifer laughed, recalling one instance of this:

I posted I had this huge test this week, so I took [Marley] to the coffee shop to study with me, and I took this photo of her with my laptop right there . . . And then people saw me in person and said, “Good luck on your test, I saw it on Marley’s Instagram!”

Pet Instagram images may reveal more information about the poster than the pet.

Pets form a huge portion of their owner’s identity, and my participants discussed their pets in ways that adhere to Blouin’s (2013) humanistic pet orientation. Talking about Marley, Jennifer explained, “I bought preset editing packages for Instagram. I don’t even use them on my Instagram . . . they cost fifty dollars to buy. I downloaded the Lightroom app for it.” Jennifer wanted Marley’s Instagram to be reflective of Marley’s “diva” personality, so doing more for the dog’s Instagram and not her own made sense. Beyond the quality of the pet Instagram photos, my participants also revealed the lengths they go to make sure pets are treated as beloved family members. For all my participants, pets were viewed as beloved family members, and considerable time, effort, money, and care were put into their pets. Therefore, making an Instagram account for a pet can be part of having a humanistic pet orientation. Making a pet Instagram is not the only qualification to adhere to this view, but it is another way in which individuals go above and beyond for their pets.

However, points of tension emerged in discussing pet Instagram accounts in conjunction with broader pet photo politics online. While Sarah noted there was “an added element when you know the animal or the owner,” many of my participants discussed how this is often not the case. This led into discussions of the politics of pet photographs in the cute economy, which I turn to below.

Politics of pet photos

All pet photos do not have equal currency weights in the cute economy. My participants disclosed creating these separate accounts for their pets was often because of how they believed pet photos should be shared online, and how they believed others thought pet photos should be shared. These sentiments invoke the imagined audience and context collapse (Marwick and boyd, 2010), but a full discussion of pet photos and these phenomena are outside the scope of this work. Instead, I focus on what these unspoken rules of sharing pet photos are, and how they contribute to my participants’ meaning-making strategies of pet Instagram accounts.

My participants noted how friends and family members would joke with them if they posted too many pet photos, and I inquired into their experiences here. If the Internet really is for pictures of cute pets, why would they put this content in a separate, dedicated space? Laurel offered some insight:

Why are people annoyed with too many pictures of cute puppies? I guess there’s a tipping point somewhere. I don’t know what it is about seeing the same animal over and over again, but it can get people’s gears grinding. It can get my gears grinding.

Despite being a pet owner and embracing the fur baby identity herself, Laurel reflected that even she got frustrated seeing pictures of the same animal. Darren’s comments to me offered more of an understanding: “Look, the Internet is for cats. But, it’s like, people want to see pictures of animals online, but when it’s constantly associated with you, they don’t necessarily want to see your animal all of the time.” I pressed him on this point, and he elaborated,

Like, I’m thinking of pictures of animals on Reddit and Tumblr, and how they aren’t always associated with a particular person. If I go on Reddit and look at pictures of a cat, or follow a stranger’s cat on Instagram, it could be anyone’s. It doesn’t belong to my neighbor or my ex. Certain people want to keep up specifically with your pet, but I guess it’s better to not know who the pet belongs to when it is shared with the whole internet. It’s more fun . . . it could mean anything.

Darren’s words support Laurel’s musings. The decontextualized pet was more fun because that pet photo could mean anything when it was not tied to a specific owner, therefore removing that key link in the pet image’s chain of meanings and articulations.

Richard also discussed this, but he had a different perspective. He commented, “Your social media profiles should be, I don’t know, what’s the word—holistic?” It was not necessarily the particular pet people were annoyed with, but only sharing one type of content. Anneliese’s comments were also indicative of this: “I think, partially, it’s like, there’s more to my life than Lucky. So, if you post too much about one thing it can seem like that’s all you’re thinking about.” My participants’ comments here reflect a main rule of online pet photos—the decontextualized pet is more fun than the pet tethered to an owner.

The imperative and problem of joy

My participants understood pictures of their pets had to be shared in certain ways. They had to navigate not sharing too many photographs while providing a holistic social media presentation. But when I asked my participants why and how they kept up with these accounts, almost all of my participants mused on the importance of joy. This joy, however, is not uncomplicated. Below, I first show how my participants discussed joy, and then I assess the struggles and contradictions of such a practice. I separate my participants’ discussions of joy from their struggles and contradictions only for my argument’s clarity. Joy, its struggles, and its contradictions must always be analyzed in tandem, and the discussion returns to this union.

My participants frequently discussed the relationship between pet photos and larger social media themes. Jill provided an insightful look into this relationship:

My close circle of friends, a lot of ways we communicate is we forward Instagram posts or memes to each other . . . I would say a lot, a good percentage of the ones I contribute to the conversation are cute animal things. Like to break up the sadness of the world. Like, “here’s a list of all the people who died in Afghanistan this week, but also, here’s a French Bulldog all tucked in for bed.” I guess pet Instagram accounts fall into that category. You want to make sure there’s stuff getting into people’s heads and minds that it’s not all doom and gloom and capitalism. I don’t know, those seem to be the two things everything is on the internet these days. Everyone is trying to sell you something or the world is falling apart.

Fellow participants echoed similar sentiments. Maddie, who co-ran her dog’s Instagram with her boyfriend, told me, “We just hope people smile. Every once in a while, we’ll post, you know, ‘I hope you have a great day filled with puppy kisses!’ and it’s a photo of Pepper licking the camera.” Related to Jill’s point that the Internet is full of “doom and gloom and capitalism,” Jacqueline noted,

Social media used to be this fun thing, and now it can come with a lot of negativity and stress. So, I have followed certain cute animal accounts as just a way to have a burst of positivity in my Feed as I’m scrolling. Being able to add to that is nice too.

Anneliese acknowledged joy’s limitations, saying,

I don’t think making [Lucky] the poster dog for Internet positivity is going to be a particularly effective or useful thing. But, implicitly acknowledging he’s really fucking cute when he stamps his feet . . . people can maybe relate to that on some level.

But Shannon added,

It’s just a nice break from CNN and the New York Times. I would also like to say that [my daughter] is now a law student, and I feel like if she sees a picture of [our dog], and she likes it, I think that’s good for her, good for her mental state.

Shannon’s words simultaneously reference the barrage of political news in the world and the relationship between social media and mental states. On this point, Hillary thought out loud in front of me:

The stuff that is reported on social media is usually like it increases depression, we waste too much time on it . . . I guess that’s contrasted with the idea that you go on the internet to look at funny animal pictures and it makes everything better . . . I think it has real emotional implications, like psychological implications, that we can look at pictures of animals online . . . it’s like a self-care thing. I’m going to look at pictures of animals to make myself feel better.

Across my participants, there was a sentiment that pet Instagram accounts help break up the dominant types of content found on Instagram. Jill’s comments particularly echoed this:

Instagram has become this place where people are either trying to sell you something, or, I don’t know, get you to join Beach Body or sell you essential oils or whatever. Or they’re trying to show off how cool their life is. And it’s just nice to have a respite inside of that, like, I don’t know, it’s just a dog being cute. And if we can inject a little happiness into the world by showing how cute our dogs are, great.

My participants enjoyed seeing pet photos on social media to break up the dominant types of content, but they also enjoyed actively adding to Instagram’s pet photos. On this note, when I asked Carrie what she hoped people got out of her pets’ Instagram accounts, she said, “pure joy. That’s it . . . there’s a lot of negative stuff in the world right now, and if one little corner of the world can be pure, it’s pet Instagrams.”

However, in going into deeper discussions, it became apparent that this “pureness” was not always the case. While some of my participants cited wholesomeness, other of my participants noted how in addition to not wanting to spam friends, these accounts were created specifically because they wanted their pets to become Insta-famous. Hillary mentioned, “I started an Instagram account so I wouldn’t spam my friends . . . but I also want [Boots] to get famous, and you can’t do that with a private account.” Jacqueline, in referencing pet influencers, admitted, “We realized if we could get free dog food or free dog toys because our puppy was popular, that would be awesome.” However, both Hillary and Jacqueline subsequently conceded the difficulties of achieving Insta-fame and instead reflected on what the account now does for them and others. In discussing current motivations, Hillary commented now that she had given up on Boots’s attempts at Instagram celebrity; she said, “I hope followers get the warm fuzzy feeling I get when I look at a cat photos.” This indicates one, how someone’s motivations and interests may change from the start of a pet Instagram account to its current form, and two, theorizing joy in pet Instagram accounts may not be “joy or Insta-fame,” but “joy and Insta-fame” to better reflect the numerous factors at work in creating and maintaining pet social media.

Other participants, however, notably eschewed Instagram’s entrepreneurial dynamics and made sure to convey they never intended their contributions to the cute economy to yield financial or material benefits. Shannon told me, “That was not my goal. I didn’t want to be famous.” Anneliese bemoaned, “One thing that makes me feel icky is the dog influencer pages . . . I never wanted Lucky to be a sponsored dog, like 25% off leashes and things like that.” Vickie, feeling similarly, recalled one particular experience she had on her bearded dragon’s Instagram:

I had somebody contact me through their messaging system and told me “we love your account. We would love you to be an ambassador for our brand.” . . . So I wrote back and asked what it entailed. Basically, what it was, they were going to give me a 50% discount on anything and they wanted me to post pictures. And I said no. I only have something like 100 followers, I’m not a big account. This is just something I do for fun.

While this experience did not tarnish Vickie’s feelings of Charlie’s Instagram, it demonstrates how even when one starts a pet Instagram account for casual purposes, they are not exempt from Instagram’s cultural dynamics. While we may say aww at pet photos, joy is not without its complexities. Joy is never monolithic, even within each individual’s experience, and joy manifested differently for each of my participants. While individuals who run these accounts may try to carve out a bit of space on social media to enjoy animal images, these accounts, their creators, and their pets do not exist uniformly or in a bubble. Social media trends may find their way to push in, either from other accounts or even in the owner’s own complex feelings.

Discussion and conclusion

A popular Internet meme features a cartoon dog sitting at a table while flames fill the room around him. He simply states, “this is fine.” This meme has come to be used in response to worrisome situations, such as political rumblings or an inappropriate response to a natural or man-made crisis. In an interview with the image’s creator (the image hails from a 2013 web comic called “On Fire”), The Verge asked why he thought the image resonated, and he responded, “Because it’s a feeling we all have, apparently. It’s a feeling we all get of just like, ‘Things are burning down around me, but you got to smile sometimes’” (Plante, 2016). While pundits have remarked upon the persevering image of the flippant dog within the encroaching fire, few have considered the importance that it is a dog at the center of this bonfire of humanity. It is precisely animal and pet images, and the cute economy, writ large, that allows us work to make our online experiences habitable.

The “this is fine” meme reflects my participants’ experiences: social media may make one feel poorly sometimes, but this does not have to be accepted. It is possible for individuals to circumvent this. In curating pet Instagram accounts to share joy, they can say, “this is fine,” and carve out habitable spaces to keep the metaphorical flames at bay. Pet Instagram accounts underscore the “we-mode” Segal (2018) invokes in theorizing joy—these accounts serve a purpose for the self but also an intentional purpose for others. This is part of the success of the Internet’s cute economy—images of pets can express joy where joy may not often be found. Pet photos therefore underscore a rather optimistic ethos: we are sometimes willing to take care of ourselves and our followers online. This by no means solves all, or any, of social media’s problems, but it does show that spreading joy is a tactic to make social media experiences habitable.

However, the “this is fine” meme with its glib dog and impinging fire underscores another central point of this research’s findings: in this resonant meme, it is not the dog versus the fire, but the dog in the fire. Such a simple linguistic notation makes all of the difference in reading the image, for in declaring “this is fine” when things are clearly not fine, the dog exhibits either denial or a reluctant acceptance of less-than-ideal circumstances. For my participants, the metaphorical flames are the toxicity and negativity they describe, and while they may not be as resigned as the “this is fine” dog, they understand their spaces are circled by social and economic contexts that may get close, heat things up, and even eventually burn the individual.

Pet Instagram accounts and tactics are not monolithic. Whereas tactics are always in a dialectic with surrounding situations, pet Instagram accounts are also always imbricated within existing cultural contexts. One cannot simply declare the tactic as done. Like joy, tactics must constantly be worked toward with intentionality, as circumstances change. Vickie’s anecdote of being approached to sell products is worth noting again here—Vickie only wanted to create a fun, small space for Charlie’s photos, but individuals strongly adhering to certain cultural dynamics of Instagram sought her out. By refusing to give in, Vickie reaffirmed her own purposes of joy and resistance to Instagram’s broader culture. Other participants sometimes worked in reverse, choosing to resist Instagram’s cultural dynamics only after realizing making their pet Insta-famous was incredibly difficult. In this case, participants started out intertwined in Instagram’s entrepreneurial dimensions, but found a path out of the metaphorical flames to recommit to fun and joy.

What these anecdotes underscore is how pet Instagram accounts always exist on spectrums, sliding between various points of amateur, professional, influencer, friends, joy, and toxicity. Far from existing at one absolute endpoint, accounts may exist in more gray areas that utilize practices from all these tenets. While the complexities of the factors I outlined have been readily established by Internet scholars, pet imagery provides a particularly fertile ground for such dialectics because “ours is a culture in which animal references can be employed in any context, and in which animals can apparently be used to mean anything and everything” (Baker, 2001: 4). The malleability of animal imagery, combined with numerous, pervasive social media practices, problematizes what Carrie divulged: “There’s a lot of negative stuff in the world right now, and if one little corner of the world can be pure, it’s pet Instagrams.” Pet Instagram accounts are always including extraneous social media practices, ideas, and ideologies in their displays.

This is yet another reason why I conceive of my findings—self-representation, humanistic pet ownership, politics of photo sharing, and joy—as interlocking and not disparate. The perceived politics of sharing pet images indicates how joy is contingent upon socially agreed upon ideas. Similarly, it is imperative the human posting and creating on behalf of the pet not be overlooked. Human posters are at the heart of almost all animal imagery. Pet Instagram accounts reveal more about individual selves and how people construct their pets and pet experiences online. Analyses of these dovetailing findings are discussed more in depth below.

My participants’ pet Instagram stories also yield understandings into the cute economy—specifically how the cute economy is not just an exchange of cute pet photos, but how the cute economy can be commodified into a literal economy. My participants’ experiences show how joy is concomitant with cuteness when it comes to pet Instagram accounts, and once again considering Lukacs’s (2015) discussions of cuteness as labor, it is possible to also consider joy as labor in digital cultures. As Vickie’s anecdote shows, cultivating cuteness and wanting to spread joy may be commodified. Joy is a by-product of the cute aesthetic, and it performs the work of invoking feelings of innocence and care. Cuteness and joy are far from pure concepts, and they can often be the very techniques that are commodified. The very animal image aesthetic Berger (2009) writes as being a reprieve from pressures of the industrialized world is also always already imbricated in the industrialized world. Joy can be a means of resistance on pet Instagram accounts, but joy and cuteness are a slippery neoliberal slope into commodification in the cute economy.

Such commodification is further problematized when considering decontextualized pet photographs, humanistic pet ownership, and the extended self. As mentioned, my participants noted even they would get sick of seeing the same pet on social media, and decontextualized pets were sometimes more fun. In his analysis of Reddit amateur media production, Meese (2014) found creators struggled to claim intellectual property rights when uploading animal art to Reddit, as popular animal content is colloquially theorized as “belonging to the Internet.” Meese uses these Reddit photos to study larger attribution struggles, but given what I have found on a preference for decontextualized pet photos, Internet culture is dominated by a sentiment that cute animal photos, regardless of creator or poster, belong to the Internet. Given the multiple chains of meaning surrounding pet photos, “belonging to the Internet” is an erasure of the image’s original context and purpose.

Considering the relationships I have explored between humanistic pet ownership, the extended self, and pet images, this penchant for decontextualized pets is worrisome. Since pets are part of performing the extended self, taking an animal image without consent bears a striking resemblance to the artwork theft ubiquitous on platforms like Instagram, as well as digital kidnapping—the taking and using of a child’s photos without consent. Artwork theft and digital kidnapping blur when speaking of pets for numerous reasons: one, in many Western countries, pets are considered property, even though passionately devoted owners may feel otherwise. Two, distinctions do need to be made between an image of a made-up animal being used with consent (such as the “this is fine” dog) and the image of one’s actual pet or animal used without permission. While the former warrants more of an artwork theft response in the realm of copyright infringement, the latter is much more complex. In addition to the pet being taken without consent, one’s extended self becomes susceptible to digital kidnapping as well, since pet images always say more about the owner than the animal. For instance, independent creators with no ties to the original owner or creator sell stickers, apparel, and more of the “this is fine” dog on sites like Etsy and RedBubble. However, pet owners also experience this. The cat featured in one of 2019’s most popular memes, titled “Woman yelling at cat,” was a hissing cat named SmudgeLord, who’s photo had been taken from his owners Tumblr without her consent. Whether this is copyright infringement, digital kidnapping, or a strange amalgamation of the two remains unclear.

While individuals may try to use practices like pet Instagram accounts to make their favorite sites habitable, pet and animal images are never divorced from broader Internet contexts. Humanistic pet ownership, the extended self, joy, and cuteness make performing petness on social media enjoyable and capable of resistance, but they are also the very factors that can also be problematized by large social media dynamics. While individual social media users may harness social media affordances to cultivate joy, pet photos are not without their problematic aspects. The Internet may be for pictures of cute animals, but not all pictures of cute animals are treated equally. The complexities of pet Instagram accounts show that Internet “aww” cannot readily be untangled from Internet “eww.”

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jessica Maddox

Author biography

Jessica Maddox is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama and an affiliate faculty member in the College of Communication and Information Sciences doctoral program. Her work has been published in Television & New Media, Social Media + Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She tweets at @drmadmaddox.

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