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New Apps Make Life Easier for Pet Owners

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New Apps Make Life Easier for Pet Owners

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At this point, there is likely to be a specific app for virtually all aspects of pet ownership These apps often help owners in the various practical aspects of pet ownership and change the ways people go about raising and taking care of pets. Access to information and professionals has risen as a result of these apps. For example, the app Goodpup creates a  training plan for the user's new puppy which includes brief weekly conferences with a trainer (Mauren, 2022). Other apps such as “Cat Training” act as a kind of digital encyclopedia for information on the various problems associated with pet ownership (Mauren,2022). Certain social media apps exist specifically for pets such as Dogster and Caster which allow users to set up a social media page for their pet as if they were a person (Golbeck, 2011).

New camera devices such as the Furbro Dog Camera allow pet owners to be able to watch their pets through their devices (Rosenwald, 2020). With technologies and apps such as these, we are seeing a kind of inter species exchange of information taking place remotely.

References

"Caster logo [image]." (n.d.) Googleplay, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wolves.catster&hl=en_US
Golbeck, J. (2011). The more people I meet, the more I like     my dog: A study of pet-oriented social networks on the Web. First Monday, 16(2) retrieved from https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2859/2765

Mauren, C. (2022, March 7). " 10 best apps for pet owners."
Mashable, https://mashable.com/article/best-apps-pet-         owners-roundup

Rosenwald, M.S. (2020, February 26). "New technology               allows pet owners to spy on every sniff and shredded slipper." Seattletimes, https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/new-technology-allows-pet-owners-to-spy-on-every-sniff-and-shredded-slipper/

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Many blogs related to pets meet both pet owners' practical information needs as well as their needs for recreation, entertainment, and needs related to a general interest in animals. An example of this kind of blog includes the “Dogington Post” (2023) which is modeled after a newspaper or magazine website and features stories categorized with a broad range of labels such as “celebrity pets, food guidelines, awesome stories, and dogs & laws.” "Pawsitively Pets" (2023) is a blog that is an example of people expressing their love for animals through the sharing of pet information both personal and technical. The site is run by a former vet technician and a “pet parent,” and unique features include product reviews and information about exotic pets (Pawsitively Pets, 2023).

References
Pawsitively pets, (2023). "About" https://www.mypawsitivelypets.com/p/about.html
"Pet blogging [image]." (n.d.). Sheknows https://www.sheknows.com/living/articles/973903/5-top-pet-bloggers/
The Dogginton Post. (2023). ["Homepage"].
https://www.dogingtonpost.com/

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Emerging technologies have revolutionized the average pet owner's relationship to pet health information. Pet owners now have various new avenues of obtaining pet health information such as the American Veterinary Medical Association’s resources on pet care. Such sources allow for greater opportunities for self-education on pet health matters and a greater general knowledge of everyday pet health matters.

Pet health information is also often discussed within Facebook groups  or on pet specific forum websites such as PAW Talk. In general, pet owners approach such resources with a cautious optimism and point to the veterinary as their number one source of pet health information.

References
American Veterinary Medical Association. (2023). Resources
for pet owners. https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/pet-owners

"AVMA logo [Image]." (n.d.), American veterinary medical association, https://www.avma.org/membership/SAVMA

Kogan, L. R., Little, S., & Oxley, J. (2021). Dog and cat owners’ use of online Facebook groups

for pet health information. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 38(3), 203–223.

https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12351

PAW-Talk. (2023). Paw Talk - Pet Forums. https://www.paw-talk.net/

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Pet owners as an information community are perhaps best defined by the “capacity to exploit emerging technologies” (Fisher & Fulton, 2022, p. 43). It can be argued that the Internet, emerging technologies, and new medias have cemented pet owners as a unique information community with various distinct information needs and behaviors. These needs and behaviors are often practical in nature, but are becoming increasingly creative, expressive, and social as new channels of information establish themselves in our day to day life. Through these information behaviors, pet owners support themselves and others in pet ownership, connect to other pet owners, and participate in broader social media practices.

References
Fisher,K.E.& Fulton, C. (2022). Information Communities. In S. Hirsh (Ed.), Information Services  : An introduction (3rd ed., pp.41-52).. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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Major social media platforms are increasingly based in visual media such as photos and videos. Petstagram pages, which are Instagram pages people create for their pet in affiliation with their own account (Maddox,2020), are examples of this trend. Through these accounts, as Maddox (2020) points out, users establish identity as pet parents, express themselves and major life events through their pets, and collectively create an environment of joy that runs contrary to typical social media norms. However, some norms such as corporate influence and the desire to achieve some kind of social media fame can infringe upon this environment (Maddox, 2020). Such accounts thus both resist and reflect dominant power structures.

Pets are often the center point of various memes. Like social media in general, these memes are becoming based less in text more based in video, audio, and the interaction between the two. Pets are also often the subject of these memes, especially on platforms such as TikTok, and as Galloway (2022) points out, these memes highlight the ways people “use music and performance to express alternative ideas of what it means to be musical, to feel closer to and connect with the important animals in their lives, and to explore the ways they can represent non-human animals using sound  and music to explore musical concepts” (p.372) These memes point to the rise of new kinds of media forms, the interconnected nature of social media based in smartphone use, and the widespread availability of hardware and software that allows video and audio content to be synchronized. Pets, as the subject of these memes, reflect these broader cultural tendencies.

References
Galloway, K. (2022). Sensing, Sharing, and Listening to Musicking Animals across the Sonic Environments of Social Media. Twentieth-Century Music, 19(3), 369-392.

Maddox, J. (2021). The secret life of pet Instagram accounts: Joy, resistance, and  commodification in the Internet’s cute economy. New Media & Society, 23(11), 3332–                      3348. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820956345

"Petstagram [image]" (n.d.). Facebook,                                 https://www.facebook.com/petstagram.shirt/