Can social media teach us to share cities with other animals?
Shared by TERESA LLORO-BIDART and CHRISTIAN HUNOLD
Can social media teach us to share cities with other animals? Community and city Facebook pages have proliferated in popularity in the last several years. On these sites, residents openly and publicly negotiate relations with urban wildlife, including apex predators like coyotes (Hunold & Lloro-Bidart, in review). Thus, social media platforms can serve as a form of public pedagogy (Reid, 2010; Sandlin, Wright, & Clark, 2011), wherein people teach and learn about our wild and liminal kin without necessarily ever having real-life, sensory contact with them. As the boundaries of urbanization increasingly meld with open spaces, pushing animals further into the urban milieu (e.g., Lorimer, 2015; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Nxumalo, 2015; van Dooren, 2014), the role of social media’s multispecies pedagogic effect becomes increasingly important to consider, particularly given its widespread reach across the globe. Indeed, social media may play a key role in fostering more flourishing relationships with other living entities, despite the inherent and obvious contradictions associated with technological solutions to socioecological problems (e.g., Crist, 2013).
Photo of an urban coyote taken on a walk with Janet Kessler in Golden Gate State Park, San Francisco, California, United States. Photo credit: Christian Hunold.
References
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