16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'The internet is made of cats' is a half-jokingly made claim. Today, animals of all shapes and sizes inhabit our digital spaces, including companion animals, wildlife, feral animals and livestock. In this book, Deborah Lupton explores how digital technologies and datafication are changing our relationships with other animals. Playfully building on the concept of 'The Internet of Things', she discusses the complex feelings that have developed between people and animals through the use of digital devices, from social media to employing animal-like robots as companions and carers. The book brings together a range of perspectives, including those of sociology, cultural geography, environmental humanities, critical animal studies and internet studies, to consider how these new digital technologies are contributing to major changes in human-animal relationships at both the micropolitical and macropolitical levels. As Lupton shows, while digital devices and media have strengthened people's relationships to other creatures, these technologies can also objectify animals as things for human entertainment, therapy or economic exploitation. This original and engaging book will be of interest to scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 288
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgement
Introduction
Contemporary human–animal relationships
Animal–human–digital assemblages
Structure of the book
1 Conceptualizing Humans, Animals and Human–Animal Relations
Humans and animals: Western conceptual approaches
Animal rights and moral philosophy
More-than-human perspectives
Cultivating attentiveness and responsiveness
2 Animal Enthusiasts, Activism and Politics in Digital Media
Wild animal enthusiast networks and citizen science initiatives
Veganism, vegetarianism and animal activism
Contesting veganism and animal activism
Competing cultures: the #sealfies debate
The digitized animal spectacle
3 The Quantified Animal and Dataveillance
Datafication and dataveillance
Datafied wildlife
‘Smart’ agriculture
Pet tech
Dataveillance and human–animal relationships
4 Animal Cuteness, Therapy and Celebrity Online
Catness and cuteness on social media
Animals and digital celebrity cultures
Animals as therapy in digital cultures
The dark side of online cuteness and celebrity
5 Animal Avatars and Zoomorphic Robots
Animals and game cultures
Objectification, domination and animal exploitation in computer games
Zoomorphic robots as companions
Unsettling affects and zoomorphic robots
Conclusion: Reimagining Human–Animal Relations
The way forward
Appendix
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgement
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Appendix
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
iii
iv
vi
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
The Internet of Animals
Human–Animal Relationships in the Digital Age
Deborah Lupton
polity
Copyright © Deborah Lupton 2023
The right of Deborah Lupton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5276-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022944968
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgement
The writing of this book was partly funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (grant CE200100005).
Introduction
The Twitter and related Instagram accounts entitled ‘Cats Being Weird Little Guys’ feature images of cats in unusual positions or poses, or behaving in ways that most people would think of as human. There are cats standing at an oven, staring intently through the glass oven door at a pizza being baked within; cramming themselves inside unusual places such as the innards of a desktop computer, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a wastepaper basket or boot; riding on the backs of other animals, such as waterfowl; apparently using a computer, or a bank cash machine to withdraw money; dressed in human-style clothing; and displaying extreme facial expressions or contorted bodily positions.
Several dominant trends in representations of animals in popular culture can be discerned in these portrayals. First, there is the rendering of animals’ bodies, habits and lives into digitized images shared globally on social media platforms. Second, the title of this social media account (‘Cats Being Weird Little Guys’) combines the name of the species that is often presented as dominating the internet (the domestic cat) with the words ‘weird little guys’. The anthropomorphism of this phrase is striking, as is the indication that it is about the humorous or unusual ways in which cats behave. These images are presented in ways that commodify and depersonalize the cats that are shown, rendering them as objects for human entertainment. Third, these images encapsulate many of the tensions and contradictions pervading contemporary ideas and responses to animals that can be discerned across popular culture. Some of the images’ ‘weirdness’ and accompanying entertainment value lies in the ways that cats are shown as almost, but not quite, human. Other images play on the very unhuman ‘cat-like’ nature of these animals: cats’ curiosity and their capacities for agility, twisting their bodies into unusual positions or squeezing into tight spaces. Cats are portrayed simultaneously as ‘little guys’ and ‘weird’, as both ‘cute’ and ‘amusing’. Finally, these digital feline images and humans’ responses to them online are suffused with ambivalent emotional forces: enchantment and amusement, but also hints of contempt and aggression, sometimes bordering on cruelty.
These powerful affects are central to how people understand and feel about their relationships with cats and other animals in contemporary societies, in which close connections and emotional ties are routinely developed, online or with mobile devices, not only between people but also as part of human–animal relationships. At the same time as people are becoming increasingly interested and emotionally invested in other animals, digital technologies such as websites, social media platforms, apps, mobile or wearable devices, robotics and automated decision-making technologies are playing an ever more prominent role in their everyday lives (Lupton, 2015, 2020b). Applying concepts and terms from the natural world to new digital technologies is a longstanding practice. We already routinely draw on organic and ecological metaphors and images: the World Wide ‘Web’, computer ‘viruses’, ‘cloud’ computing, the ‘rivers’ or ‘tsunamis’ of big data, artificial ‘intelligence (AI)’, ‘neural’ networks, digital ‘twins’ … to name merely a few (Lupton, 2021). Such biophilic language conveys the deep affective and meaningful relationships humans have with nature, and the recognition that nature and culture are intertwined (Thomas, 2013). In turn, an expanding body of knowledge on how nonhuman living things communicate with each other through complex entanglements of underground rhizomatic fungal and tree root networks has led to metaphors referring to digital technologies, such as ‘the Wood Wide Web’, being used to describe relational connections between organic agents (Helgason et al., 1998).
Digital technologies are used to understand and document living entities and ecosystems in a rapidly expanding configuration of ‘smart’ devices, software and digital data. Just as a plethora of details about people’s bodies, habits, practices and movements in space have become increasingly rendered into digital formats, thereby creating reams of digital data about them (Lupton, 2016, 2019b; Lupton et al., 2022), so, too, animals’ bodies and lives are increasingly digitized and datafied. While it is often half-jokingly claimed that ‘the internet is made of (or ruled by) cats’, there are now many more animal species that are portrayed or monitored with the use of digital media and devices: including other companion animals, farm animals, animals in captivity and wild animals. These technologies promote the rapid generation and dissemination of images and information about animals across social networks, facilitate novel ways of monitoring animals’ activities and geolocation, and use their appearance and behaviour to convey or modify human feeling.
The Internet of Animals is the first book to bring together perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to consider how digital technologies are contributing to human–animal relationships at both the micropolitical and macropolitical levels. It builds on and extends a growing interest in social and cultural inquiry in: (i) the digitization and datafication of humans and other animals with and through new digital media and ‘smart’ devices; (ii) the affective and embodied relationships between humans and other animals; (iii) the health and environmental crises in which human health and wellbeing are inextricably entangled with those of other animals and living creatures; and (iv) more-than-human theoretical perspectives. The book delves into the ways that animals across a range of species and in a multitude of spaces are represented and incorporated into various forms of digital technologies, and the consequences for how we think and feel about, as well as relate to and treat, other animals.
Across the book’s chapters, the broader socioeconomic, cultural, biological and geographical contexts in which these technological interventions have emerged and are implemented are carefully considered. Many animal species are becoming threatened by catastrophic changes to their habitats and lives caused by humans, such as ecological degradation and pollution; climate change, global warming and extreme weather events; and the clearing of forests to make way for industries or the expansion of cities. Animals’ health and wellbeing have been severely undermined by these human-wrought crises, including exacerbating their exposure to disease, depriving them of their usual food sources, disrupting breeding cycles, accelerating species extinction and contributing to biodiversity loss. Industries devoted to the mass production of digital technologies (mobile and other computing devices, WiFi, and digital data storage facilities) and to energy generation to power these technologies, together with the accumulation of non-degradable ‘e-waste’ from discarded devices and additional landfill toxins, make a massive contribution to these detrimental effects on planetary health. Digital media play a major role in drawing public attention to cases of animal mistreatment and cruelty, but also contribute to the objectification of animals and the vilification of species deemed to be threats to human welfare or the economy, requiring tight containment or extermination.
I write from the perspective of a privileged white person living in the Global North who has never had to suffer famine or food insecurity. I do not identify as an animal rights activist, but I support – and sometimes campaign for – environmental politics. I fear for and care about the health, welfare and futures of other humans and the other creatures that inhabit our planet (flora and fauna). These personal experiences and perspectives, together with my academic research expertise and interests, are the foundation of the arguments I advance in this book. I want to provoke thought by surfacing unsettling ideas, practices and feelings, and raising (but not necessarily answering) difficult questions about human–animal relationships in the digital age.
In choosing The Internet of Animals as the book’s title, I have sought to encapsulate diverse modes of digitization and datafication of animals by playfully building on the established ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) terminology. My conceptualization of the Internet of Animals encapsulates both the internet of animals and the internet and animals. The IoT is commonly used to describe ‘smart’ devices that are interconnected, exchanging digital data with each other. An oft-used definition is that put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2016: 4): ‘The IoT refers to an ecosystem in which applications and services are driven by data collected from devices that sense and interface with the physical world.’ The IoT has been made possible by technological developments such as smaller and cheaper sensors, reliable ubiquitous wireless connections, mobile devices, improved software for managing large data sets, and an ecosystem for the generation, processing and storing of data, in conjunction with the emergence of the digital data economy (Maras and Wandt, 2019). To some extent, the Internet of Animals title, as I use it in this book, draws on the IoT, but it is also much broader and more inclusive. For my purposes, the Internet of Animals includes both these well-established technologies and novel and emerging devices and software of the type commonly referred to as ‘smart’ technologies. A huge variety of animals are imbricated in and with the latest digital technologies. These devices and media include mobile apps and wearable devices, memes and GIFs, drones, surveillance cameras, livestreaming services and robotic devices.
Concepts such as ‘smart cities’ and ‘smart homes’ make reference to the IoT. Animals inhabit these spaces and are therefore part of the IoT. Additionally, a vast array of ‘smart’ technologies has emerged to monitor, control and protect farm animals and wildlife and to support environmental sustainability, better farm productivity and the improved management of domesticated and wild animals. The phrase ‘the Internet of Animals’ has been used before, but with a much more specific focus, describing the ICARUS Global Monitoring with Animals initiative (ICARUS stands for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space). One of the ICARUS website pages bears the heading ‘The internet of animals’ and goes on to describe how this organization is using digital sensor devices to track remotely the behaviour and movements of wildlife such as migratory birds and bats (ICARUS, 2022). The concept of the ‘smart farm’ similarly builds on the IoT to present visions of how animals and other living entities in agricultural settings can be digitized and datafied. Smart farming includes the deployment of devices such as sensors used to monitor soil, farm animals, water and plants. The big data generated by machines such as smart tractors, robotic harvesting technologies and environmental monitoring sensors are positioned as means to determine more accurately and precisely how to control such factors as moisture levels in soils, pests, fertilizer use and the movements of animals. Some smart agriculture initiatives are also addressing wider environmental issues such as climate change, land care, pollution and biodiversity (Klerkx et al., 2019).
In addition to the IoT, many other digital technologies are in place that capture and share images and other digital data about animals. Since the 1990s, the internet and World Wide Web have offered opportunities for providing and sharing information about animals and creating local and global social networks through the use of websites, online discussion forums and blogs. Computer games have frequently featured animal avatars. From the early 2000s, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat and Reddit, messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Weibo, Telegram and WeChat, and content-sharing sites, including YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok, have facilitated such interactions and relationships.
There is accumulating evidence, most often elicited in surveys conducted by companies or organizations in the pet or veterinary industry, that people are turning to online sources and apps to find and share information about their companion animals. Pet owners use the internet to seek advice about their pets and to order the best new products on offer for them (Animal Medicines Australia, 2019; Stojanovic, 2022a). A study of dog and cat owners who used Facebook found that approximately half of them reported using that platform’s groups to give or receive pet advice from other members (Kogan et al., 2021). A 2017 industry survey of 2,000 American pet owners who used social media (cited in Aspling et al., 2018) found that 65% said that they posted about their pet on social media on average twice a week, and one in six had created a profile for their pet. One-third of the respondents said that they posted about their pets with around the same frequency as they uploaded content about their human family members. Of Australian pet owners surveyed in 2019 by Animal Medicines Australia (2019), 5% had installed home monitoring cameras for them, 7% had participated in pet-owner social media forums, and 5% had opened a social media account for their pets.
Throughout the book, I analyse the content and use of these devices, software and media from a sociocultural perspective, identifying implications for human–animal relationships and for generating ideas about future developments for digital technologies that have the potential to contribute to both human and nonhuman animal flourishing across the world. I argue that the ways in which animals are portrayed, monitored and cared for by humans using digital media and devices have significant implications for how humans and animals will live together in the near future: including human and animal health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability and activism, and industries related to digital technology development, animal care, animal protection, food production and consumption, smart homes and smart cities. I seek to contextualize digitized human–animal relationships within their more-than-digital contexts, acknowledging that digital technologies are always used in places and spaces in which other objects – both living and non-living – are present.
Contemporary human–animal relationships
There is an expanding literature devoted to examining the nature, meaning and moral dimensions of human–animal relationships, particularly in fields such as critical animal studies, the sociology of animals, ecofeminism, human–animal studies, animal ethics, critical posthumanities, environmental humanities, multispecies studies and animal geographies. While Western cultures in particular have sought to position humans as more-than-animal, and digital technologies are frequently used as part of this endeavour, a central premise of this book is that people are animals too, however much many of us like to forget or deny this reality. From this point onwards in the book, for simplicity’s sake, when using the term ‘animals’ I will always mean ‘nonhuman animals’.
In the contemporary era, a number of intersecting powerful affective and relational forces are combining to transform the ways that people are thinking, feeling and behaving in relation to other animals. These include the ever-expanding impulse towards anthropomorphizing animals; the rise and impact of cuteness cultures; the move towards positioning animals as therapeutic objects; growing interest globally in, and concern about, the health of the natural environment and the other living things that are part of ecosystems, including other animals; and a counter-discourse that represents animals/Nature as the dangerous Other. Digital technologies have contributed to the intensification of all these phenomena, all of which are at least partly responses to the socioeconomic and health crises that have erupted over the past few decades.
People are becoming much more sentimental about and attached to animals: particularly warm-blooded furry mammals and those they keep as companion animals (Fox and Gee, 2019). More than 67% of US households own at least one pet (Puac, 2022), with a similar proportion (61%) in Australia (Animal Medicines Australia, 2019) and (at 62%) in the UK (Statista, 2022). The UK figure is an increase of 15% in the past decade, with a large increase in 2020 and 2021 (Statista, 2022). A dominant trend in these affective connections is the anthropomorphizing of pets: particularly of dogs and cats. These companion animals are now treated by many people in the Global North as part of their families, close to bearing the status of children (as suggested by the commonly used terms ‘fur babies’ and ‘pet parents’). Pet owners are also expected to take responsibility for caring for and controlling their companion animals far more than in the past (Fox and Gee, 2019).
A survey of Australian pet owners in 2019 found that most saw their dogs and cats as beloved family members. This status is reflected in the most popular names for these animals, many of which were common human names: Max, Bella, Charlie, Chloe, Lucy, Leo or Felix. Of these pet owners, 37% described themselves as a ‘pet parent’, 47% allowed their pet to sleep on the same bed, and 35% left on the heating/cooling, lights or television/radio for their animals when the respondent was out of the home. The respondents described the joy of spending time with their pets, the unconditional love and companionship they felt they received from the animals, the feeling of having a purpose in their lives in caring for their pets, the positive impact on their health and mental wellbeing, and being unable to imagine life without their pets (Animal Medicines Australia, 2019). In the US, more than 50% of both dog and cat owners give their pets a gift at Christmas (Puac, 2022). Pet deaths are acknowledged and grieved more publicly than in previous eras, with owners typically representing the loss as equivalent to the death of a family member and often using social media to announce the death (Behler et al., 2020).
A large and rapidly developing industry has sprung up to respond to an increase in companion animal ownership. In the UK, this expenditure was estimated at close to £8 billion in 2020, up from almost £3 billion in 2005 (Statista, 2022). In the USA, pet expenditure was estimated at US$123 billion in 2021 and has been steadily growing year on year (Stojanovic, 2022b). Much of this spending, which was spurred by the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, goes on pet food, veterinary care, grooming, boarding services, pet clothing and health insurance (Puac, 2022; Stojanovic, 2022b). When once pets were euthanized with barely a thought if they developed a serious medical condition, their lives are now often extended by the kind of expensive surgery that humans have. They can have hip or knee replacement operations, surgery for cancer and are prescribed drugs to treat anxiety. Puppies attend ‘puppy preschool’ to be trained in compliant behaviour.
Animals are becoming drawn into human wellness cultures, used as therapy objects or to alleviate loneliness. This use of animals builds on a trend in recent decades for ‘animal-assisted therapy’, where ‘therapy pets’ (mostly dogs, but sometimes cats, rabbits or guinea pigs) are brought into healthcare settings as a way of helping people to develop communication skills and improve depression or anxiety, or to provide distraction and emotional comfort to ill people in those spaces (Krause-Parello et al., 2019). More broadly, as part of mainstream wellness cultures, animals are employed in workplaces and educational institutions as objects to alleviate stress and to provide companionship: for example, bringing baby animals to schools and universities to alleviate students’ exam stress. As Claire Parkinson (2019: 97) observes: ‘increasingly nonhuman animals are valued not for their “practical” use but for their emotional labour’. These affective attachments have only intensified during the COVID-19 crisis. The difficult conditions experienced by people around the world from the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, when many were faced with isolation, loneliness, mental distress and ‘touch hunger’ (Lupton, 2022), have led to a focus on achieving better health and wellbeing by interacting with animals: both online and face to face. Studies have demonstrated the comfort and solace that people gained from interacting with and feeling connected to animals, other living things and landscapes during the COVID crisis (Lupton and Lewis, 2022; Packer et al., 2021).
Cuteness cultures (referred to as kawaii culture, or kawaisa in Japanese) are a major driver of contemporary human–animal relationships: at least for a highly select group of species. In Japanese, kawaii means ‘lovable’, ‘cute’ or ‘adorable’ and refers to people or things that are pretty or dependent, including human and animal infants and older people (Nittono et al., 2021). In contemporary English, the word ‘cute’ is associated with sweetness, guilelessness and vulnerability (Nittono et al., 2021). While kawaii is culturally Japanese, it has found universal appeal outside Japan, contributing to both economic and cultural power for that nation (Allison, 2004; Kanesaka, 2022). Anthropologist Ann Allison (2004: 34–5) defines kawaii culture in English as involving attachments to imaginary creations or creatures with resonances both to childhood and to traditional Japanese culture. The history of cute aesthetics is usually traced back to the Edo period in Japan (1603–1868), but kawaii culture dramatically expanded in that country in the 1970s, then moving to East Asia and, more recently, Western cultures. Kawaii culture was positioned as offering the power of healing (initially in the post-World War II context in a devastated Japan) by generating feelings of tenderness and care, together with nostalgic appreciation of nature and tradition – essentially, a simpler, more intimate and less stressful world (Kanesaka, 2022).
The academic scholarship on cute affect was developed in the 1940s, led by German ethologist Konrad Lorenz, whose speciality was animal behaviour. He observed that infant humans and other animals tended to share similar physical features, which he called the ‘baby schema’: small bodies in relation to large round heads, large foreheads, short thick appendages, clumsy movements and large low-set eyes. Lorenz argued that these features evoked protective feelings in adults towards human infants, thereby acting as a survival mechanism that ensured that helpless babies would be nurtured (Dale et al., 2017). While most psychologists now dispute that such responses are instinctive rather than acculturated, or see them as a combination of both (Dale et al., 2017), the principles of appeal as outlined by Lorenz remain readily apparent in contemporary times in terms of which animals are deemed to be ‘cute’ and which are not. For example, a cross-cultural study involving participants in Japan, the US and Israel (Nittono et al., 2021) found that, while there were minor differences in how cuteness was defined, most features were universal across these nations. It is notable that infant animals were considered cuter than human infants in the participant group as a whole.
Cuteness as an affective force or aesthetic quality tends to be portrayed as trivial, facile, sentimental and feminized: not a ‘serious’ feeling or value, despite abundant evidence of how capacious this feeling is and the diverse effects it has on people’s use of the internet and social media, together with its economic value in commodity culture (Dale et al., 2017; Meese, 2014). Animals deemed to be cute receive a huge amount of attention on the internet – particularly in social and visual media. In what has been described as the internet ‘cute economy’ coming together with the participatory culture fostered by social media and online discussion forums (Meese, 2014), users of the internet have profited in creating and sharing appealing images of animals. The ‘Grumpy Cat’ internet meme is perhaps the most well known of the many animal-related images featuring amusing or cute animals that have circulated for some years. However, Grumpy Cat is only one of countless cat memes, GIFs and videos available online, along with many other portrayals of animals that are considered appealing.
A greater sensitivity and concern towards the welfare and wellbeing of the natural environment and ecological systems are also contributing to shifts in people’s feelings about other animals. Images of animals are used by activist organizations to provoke strong affective responses as part of initiatives to fight animal cruelty. Among wild animals, the koala, even as an adult animal, fits Lorenz’ schema perfectly, with its large round head, low set eyes, stocky body, short appendages and waddling gait. Koalas are often to be found in ‘cute animal’ digital portrayals and are strategically used as charismatic flagship species in conservation awareness and fundraising efforts (Bergman et al., 2022). While cute affects play some role in these affective connections, broader ethical principles concerning animal rights and the awe-inspiring power and beauty of nature are central to these transformations. A notable move towards attunement to issues such as animal welfare in farming, the horse and greyhound racing industries and the fur industry, together with heightened awareness of the environmental impacts of factory farming, is evident in the wealthy countries comprising the Global North. Many people have adopted an ethical stance on the treatment and use of animals and are changing their consumption habits accordingly. Practices such as the adoption of organic, vegetarian and vegan diets are also expanding rapidly in response to concern about animal welfare and environmental sustainability (Kalte, 2021).
On the other hand, however, millions of animals, including both domesticated and wild animals, are still widely exploited for the benefit of humans: bred or captured to provide food, clothing, medicinal therapies or companionship. Some animals have become increasingly vilified and subject to containment and control, including ‘pest’ species such as bed bugs, mice and insects that eat crops (Feber et al., 2017; Taylor and Twine, 2014). Furthermore, animals have become increasingly portrayed by the news media as dangerous in health risk discourses. Such crises as ‘mad cow’ disease, dioxin in chickens, salmonella in eggs and trans-species viral infections that have caused pandemics such as the avian and swine influenza, together with news media reports of wild or domesticated animals that have attacked humans, have positioned animals as the source of illness, injury, infection and death. Media coverage of these animal-related risks has raised the spectre of savage, diseased or mutated species created by humans’ meddling into ‘natural’ processes (Molloy, 2011).
An intriguing feature of digital media portrayals of the COVID-19 crisis involved visual images and narratives shared on social media sites that purported to demonstrate the renewed habitation of urban spaces by domestic or wild animals (goats in the streets of a Welsh town, dolphins in the Venetian canals, kangaroos leaping down city byways in the Australian cities, wild boars gathering close to major roads in Barcelona). Some of the images were fake, or from pre-COVID times. Nonetheless, they drew attention to the role of humans in the emergence of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. So, too, reporting of wet markets in the city of Wuhan, China, where the first COVID cases were identified, emphasized humans’ mistreatment of wild animals as part of the wildlife trade, and their incursion into animals’ habitats. Questions were raised in these media concerning whether the pandemic was ‘nature striking back’ at humans for their abuse and mindless exploitation of animals and other living things (Lupton, 2022).
These types of portrayals reflect the ambivalence felt by humans towards nature. Nature is positioned in some representations as the superior, pure Other to the Self of humanity, but in others as contaminated, wild, out of control and highly dangerous to human health and wellbeing. These dangerous animals are positioned in some cases as liminal – such as domesticated dogs that seem almost human-like but which then may turn on humans and attack them; and hybrid – such as ‘mad cows’ that have consumed other animals’ remains and thus been transformed by human action from herbivores to carnivores, or trans-species viruses that are able to cross between humans and other animal species. In recent times, wild animals such as bats, civets and pangolins have been linked to serious outbreaks of infectious diseases in humans, such as the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics, which involved transmission of viruses from wild animals that had been captured for human consumption. For example, millions of farmed mink in Denmark were slaughtered due to the concern that they harboured and spread the coronavirus causing COVID-19 (Murray, 2020). Such culls demonstrate the positioning of animals as economic commodities, rather than living beings worthy of protection, with animal disease portrayed as a trade issue rather than an animal health and wellbeing concern (Coghlan et al., 2021; Riley, 2022).
Animal–human–digital assemblages
Perspectives that social researchers have used previously to understand the implications of the ways that humans are digitized and datafied, and the affective connections established between people with and through digital media and devices, can be brought to bear to understand how these technologies are employed to portray and monitor other animals. In so doing, we can ask fundamental questions not only about people’s experiences of digital societies and cultures, but also about how concepts of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ are defined and the human–animal relationship is understood and performatively practised.
Research on the use of digital platforms such as online discussion forums and social media has demonstrated the value of such media for making and reinforcing relational and affective connections with others. In what have been described as ‘the sharing economy’ (John, 2017) and the generation of ‘networked intimacy’ and ‘digital intimate publics’ (Dobson et al., 2018), these platforms can configure strong affective ties between people who may never have met in person or even know each other’s real names. The sharing economy relies on users of such platforms to share all kinds of information about themselves or about their interests and passions. Users of these sites can find an intense sense of community and intimacy with other users, centred around shared interests or concerns such as health problems, fandom and life stage. Other users are invited to respond by making comments; providing feedback or advice; using ‘like’, emojis and other symbols demonstrating affective responses; or by sharing the content with other internet or app users. Visual media such as selfies, GIFs, memes and YouTube or TikTok videos are ways of visually encapsulating feelings and opinions, and therefore offer opportunities for people to convey these feelings readily to others online. These images generate the most resonance and power (and ‘become viral’) when they provoke or inspire strong affective forces.
