When I can't even deal with the internet, send in the puppy gifs

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/10/internet-bad-news-puppy-gifs

Version 0 of 1.

The events of this weekend are enough to make anyone give up on the world. In New York, Kalief Browder, who was held at Riker’s Island without trial for three years as a teen, took his own life. In Texas, a white cop accosted several black children at a pool party, including physically sitting on top of a 14-year-old girl. The disturbance was the result of vicious racial attacks by white people, none of whom were sat on. I want to engage with these tragedies; as a writer and talker, I want to write and talk about them. But the more overwhelmed I feel, the more my brain keeps saying, “Screw it. All I care about is this gif”.

There’s a reason cute animal gifs bring comfort in difficult times. The snippet of looping animation is a combination of cuteness and soothing predictability. Someone immersed in a gif knows what is coming, and knows she will enjoy it; there’s no uncertainty – no choice involved. As with repeating a meditative mantra or being lulled by the rhythm of a run, the repetitiveness of a gif allows viewers to zone out and, in zoning out, potentially reach a higher, or at least calmer, level of consciousness. It’s instant zen, with goat pajamas.

That said, one 2013 study found that too much cuteness can lead, counterintuitively, to aggression; participants who looked at cute pictures popped more bubble wrap than those who didn’t, suggesting some pent-up rage, according to researchers. (Surely it could also be that cute animal gifs reconnect viewers with their inner children – what kid doesn’t love mangling bubble wrap?)

Still, if cuteness can be a source of frustration or anger, maybe we still gravitate toward gifs to break up online doom because we’re swapping out one type of frustration for another: wistful longing instead of furious impotence. The researchers who discovered “cuteness aggression” theorized that it might stem from a desire to hold or care for the animal on screen – that people experience physical signs of anger because they want to hug the wombat so bad.

Longing for hugs is just as fruitless as longing for justice, but it feels a little better, at least for a while. So though it’s a temporary fix, you should flood yourself with as many of them as you need while remembering that the only real solution might lie outside the computer screen. No matter how many times you let it loop, watching that gif won’t get you a puppy hug. To get one of those, you’ll actually have to go hug a puppy. And when you’re feeling like the world is irremediable, that’s probably what you should do.

This will only solve your feelings. It won’t solve society. Eventually, you’ll probably have to come back to this box full of anger and terrible news: most of us work here, in the internet, and activism happens here too. We feel powerless when we can’t reach through the computer screen to pull the cop off the child, and for a while, it feels better to lament instead that we can’t reach through to pet the pup.

But in the long term, the internet is a locus of power: for organizing, for rallying, for raising awareness, for calling out oppression, for offering solace to others. Watching a gif is passive consolation, but it’s possible to use the internet for active change.

So spend your rage both online and off; as fruitless as it may feel, it’s not futile. While you do, though, don’t forget to get your cute fix both online and off, too. Otherwise your frustration may just pull you one way, and your cute aggression the other, until you’re as paralyzed as – well, as two golden retrievers trying to play with the same ball.