Concordia researchers examine the triumph of social media animal content

Social media gets a lot of criticism over its platforming of toxic, divisive or polarizing content. But if you took away the awful material, much of what’s left would be unimaginably cute: clumsy puppies, fuzzy kittens, roly-poly pandas, grinning chimps. The animal kingdom is beloved online, and users want their friends to share in the warmth.  

As a new paper by Concordia researchers shows, sharing animal content goes far beyond eliciting some “awwws” and likes/hearts/hugs. Writing in the Journal of Consumer Research, the authors argue that sharing animal photos and videos, often with a cute hashtag or humorous text, creates a “digital affective encounter” — an online experience that elicits positive feelings.

Sharing these digital tokens acts as a marker of affection in a parasocial or interpersonal relationship. It can be compared to pebbling, where certain types of penguins share pebbles with potential mates during courtship rituals.

The authors assert that the circulation of animal content creates digital affective networks — the relationships and encounters centred on and facilitated by digital mood-elevating content.

“The creation, consumption and circulation of animal photos has become a social phenomenon,” says co-author Zeynep Arsel, a professor in the Department of Marketing at the John Molson School of Business. “It has gone well beyond animals advertising animal products.”

The paper is built on the MSc thesis of Ghalia Shamayleh, MSc 19, PhD 24. She is now an assistant professor at the ESSEC Business School outside Paris, France.

Embedded affection

To better understand the phenomenon, the researchers created a framework that explains the digital object’s journey from creation to circulation, working mostly on the social media platform Instagram. They interviewed content creators, animal page managers and their followers and used their own personal experiences with their own animal companions to map out how an image makes its way across a digital affective network.

The first step is indexicalization. This is taking an image, gif or video of an animal and adding an emotional cue or meaning to signify one’s relationship with it. This can take the form of putting an animal in clothing, adding a hashtag, captioning it with loving language or puns and so on. This imbues the loving relationship between the human and animal into a digital representation. Sharing it with a small network or an individual can be considered a form of pebbling.

Next comes re-indexicalization. This occurs after the content is shared in a network and interacted with in what is called a techno-affective encounter. This leads to additional cues being embedded into the content either with or without additional text. Re-indexicalization makes the cues understandable exclusively to a social network based on shared histories and creates a parasocial relationship between the human consumer and the animal.

The last step, decontextualization, occurs when the personalized information is stripped or altered by a content curator to appeal to a broad audience without a parasocial relationship. The best (and richest) curators are expert at embedding culturally relevant cues that reflect a strong connection with pop culture and zeitgeist. Through this, animal photos become memes that appeal to a wide range of people outside the initial audience for which they were intended.

Arsel notes that while this paper focused exclusively on animal content, the framework it describes is transferable to other fields, such as content depicting delicious food or cute children.

“This paper has societal implications in the sense that it explains something that we do very often and usually without question,” Arsel says. “We wanted to uncover this hidden network, and it all starts with content creators.”

Read the cited paper: “Digital Affective Encounters: The Relational Role of Content Circulation on Social Media.”