Digital wildlife expeditions and their impact on human-wildlife relations: Inside the phenomenon of livestreaming an annual moose migration

Abstract

Tracking, viewing and livestreaming wildlife in situ but online has enabled new relations of proximity and immediacy to proliferate among people who experience few real-life encounters with wild animals. Innovating affordances of programs, broadcasts, and citizen science apps to foster virtual encounters, both with the wild animals in front of the camera, and between other human users following them, now generate an arena of vicarious consumption of wildlife from one's armchair, and at the click of a button. We show how The Great Moose Migration, a slow-TV sensation airing in Sweden every spring, blends multiple genres of nature documentary to create a unique space for the constitution of new attitudes to wildlife in general and moose in particular. This program's dynamic hybridity ‘migrates’ across event-based TV, slow-TV, participatory media, multimodal media, travel-based TV, reality TV, and cross-platform media. We demonstrate how the particular features of each format represents and thus mediates the wildlife. Using a digital ecologies approach, we show how the moose also ‘migrates’ across various media and formats, becoming subject to the whims and preferences of viewers who feedback into the production- This newfound virtual accessibility to moose breaks with tradition in Sweden. We argue that an emancipation of moose from hunters is partly occurring, but that its representation – even in so-called authentic, reality TV – is subject to new registers of power, narratives and aesthetics. Our study speaks to the various implications of the re-entanglement of nature into the everyday lives and leisure and work spaces of people in modern society.