Digital intimacies and magnetic landscapes

With these concerns in mind, this article explores how digital (re)mediation practices of wildlife monitoring and surveillance are transforming human relations with threatened Hawaiian monk seals in the technonatural present. First, I ask how digital intimacy, as a powerful relation-making phenomenon in the Digital Anthropocene, opens possibilities for flourishing (Haraway Reference Haraway2008) in shared landscapes. Flourishing draws on ecofeminist conceptions of intimacy (Cuomo Reference Cuomo1998; Plumwood Reference Plumwood2002) that recognize both the potential and dangers—or ‘dynamic charm’ (Cuomo Reference Cuomo1998:71)—inherent in human-nonhuman encounters. This understanding of intimacy demands ‘response-ability’: the willingness to be affected by others and to engage through forms of adaptation and resistance that inevitably draw us into the stakes of how a relationship turns out. I suggest that emerging digital practices of surveillance reconfigure and amplify human-nonhuman intimacies, and thus the forms of response-ability they require, pulling humans and nonhumans into shared futures. The term share points to both the ways we might hold landscapes in common, or instead, divide them up in exclusionary ways (van Dooren Reference van Dooren2019). While digital technologies have often served as tools for environmental exploitation and extractive decision-making, they also hold potential for more situated understandings and ethical responses (e.g. response-ability) to the shifting multispecies contact zones in the Anthropocene.

Building on these ideas, the notion of digital intimacy further aims to identify and clarify a set of concerns in the Digital Anthropocene which revolve around the forms of (bio)power that digital technology is unleashing as it shapes human-wildlife relationships in particular directions of care, commodification, and control (von Essen et al. Reference von Essen, Turnbull, Searle, Jørgensen, Hofmeester and van der Wal2023). One concern is whether digital surveillance technologies can generate genuine interspecies intimacy through virtual proximity, or instead, if the kinds of virtual relations they enable only generate a ‘false intimacy’ (Bousé Reference Bousé2003) through the illusion of close encounters. A further concern is a history of co-development between military and wildlife conservation technology, and how contemporary developments in digital surveillance biopower used in marine wildlife conservation may ‘swell onto land’ (Fish Reference Fish2024) for use in the increasing (in)securitization (cf. Rampton & Charalambous Reference Rampton2020) of human populations in ways that involve privacy violations, and forms of social and psychological harm and exploitation.

Others are more optimistic about digital surveillance for wildlife conservation, suggesting that these technologies enable, not hinder, possibilities for intimacy and co-survival in a time of mass extinctions. However, registering these possibilities will require more situated accounts that attend to the historical, cultural, and ecological specificities of the distinct assemblage of technologies and human and nonhuman beings involved. For example, marine wildlife may not share the same psychological vulnerabilities and privacy concerns that characterize human experience, and therefore demand empirical accounts of what privacy may constitute for individual whales or seals who have different biographies of interaction with human beings. In addition, in the space of ocean and marine wildlife conservation in particular, ‘drone conservation is argued to be, not a “detachment from nature, but of a pleasurable, technological immersion in it”’ (Helmreich Reference Helmreich2009:142, cited in Fish Reference Fish2024:7). Fish (Reference Fish2024), furthermore, provides a hopeful picture of the potential for ocean digital surveillance technologies to enable new forms of ‘entangled empathy’ (Gruen Reference Gruen2015) and multispecies care (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017) to take shape. As Fish (Reference Fish2024:6) argues, the growing popularity of digital wildlife tracking and surveillant technologies, and the accompanying communities of conservation care that coalesce around these gadgets, reveal ‘an ancient longing to lengthen normative human senses outside of our bodies’ that facilitate ‘new forms of embodied intimacy’.

In the sections to follow, I examine how emerging digital surveillance practices are generating multispecies semiotic landscapes, or shared spaces through which humans and Hawaiian monk seals come to participate in, know and be affected by one another, and navigate, or experiment with possibilities for co-habitation. This aim builds on developments in semiotic landscape research (Jaworski & Thurlow Reference Jaworski and Thurlow2010; Lou Reference Lou2017) that expand inquiry into language, or sense-making more broadly, as a landscape-level phenomenon involving an assemblage of spatial practices, embodied movements, and rhythms (Kitis & Milani Reference Kitis and Tommaso2015), affective regimes (Wee Reference Wee2016), olfactory cartographies of ‘scents making’ (Pennycook & Otsuji Reference Pennycook and Otsuji2015), and more-than-human entanglements (Lamb Reference Lamb2024). Here, ‘the concepts of entanglements and assemblages, helps to understand the multiple ways in which animals (and other non-human entities) are enmeshed in linguistic, social, cultural, material, and political relations’ (Cornips, Deumert, & Pennycook Reference Cornips, Deumert, Pennycook, Vandenbroucke, Declercq, Brisard and D’Hondt2024:170; see also Cornips Reference Cornips2024).

In my effort to better attend to human-wildlife surveillance entanglements and assemblages, I’ve drawn inspiration from the conceptual metaphor of magnetism which seeks to capture how digital surveillance technologies appear to attract or pull humans and marine wildlife like Hawaiian monk seals into shared abodes and futures. I first began thinking about magnetism in conversations with marine biologists who told me about the role of digital tracking devices in revealing how sea turtles, whales, and possibly seals are using the earth’s magnetic field to find their way in an ocean of seemingly featureless, liquid seascapes. These surveillant technologies are providing a window into the perceived worlds or Umwelten of marine wildlife. The concept of Umwelt, developed by Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (Reference von Uexküll1934/Reference von Uexküll2010), describes the distinctive sensory worlds each being inhabits through their subjective entanglement, affective relations, and repertoire of (inter)actions with other beings in their environment (or ‘surrounding world’ as literally translated from German). Through empirical observation of nonhuman behaviors, the concept of Umwelt reveals how the semiotic landscapes and social bonds that matter to other species also come to matter for humans, co-shaping human social relations and overlapping forms of meaning-making in the semiotic landscape. However, without technological amplification, these Umwelten of other creatures can often remain invisible to or simply ignored by variously culturally situated and technologically enabled humans, from geomagnetic cues guiding sea turtle natal homing to underwater acoustic landscapes shaping monk seal foraging behaviors. As Schroer (Reference Schroer2021:16) argues, in developing the concept in multispecies ethnography, the idea of Umwelt encourages exploring ‘how communication and meaningful relationships can occur beyond species lines without being limited by a framework that constructs such knowledge either as anthropomorphic projection, as speculative construction, or as impossible to attain from the start’.

Attending to the overflowing richness of human and nonhuman Umwelten overlapping in the same landscape in more or less coordinated entanglements raises questions about the role discourse plays in enabling alternative and more ethical forms of participation in multispecies landscape relations. In my fieldwork, conservation and tourism discourses are the most salient forces pulling together combinations of human yearnings for wildlife connection, digital technologies and practices (such as social media), scientific institutions of animal care and control, and economic infrastructures of nature commodification, funneling people into particular relational, and often competing, projects with wildlife of care and commodification, protection, and surveillance.

Finally, the metaphor of magnetism also aims to highlight how digital infrastructures of surveillance are pulling humans and nonhumans into competing multispecies futures, with some oriented toward experimental possibilities for flourishing cohabitation, while others geared toward intensified control and value extraction. In this sense, magnetic landscapes become spaces for exploring how humans and other beings are pulled into negotiations over shared landscapes and relational intimacies, drawing us toward ecological futures that call not only for expanding our moral imaginations to include land-relations meaningful to animals, but also for recognizing animals as political agents with claims about how landscapes might be shared in more flourishing ways.

Methods and data analysis

These paradoxes of digital intimacy make it challenging to anticipate what kinds of interspecies relations, identities, and communities will take shape between different publics and wild animals, suggesting the need for less anthropocentric ethnographic methods attuned to the human and nonhuman situated practices, multisensory modalities and ethical dynamics through which multispecies relationships are negotiated and lived (e.g. Fijn & Kavesh Reference Fijn, Muhammad and Vannini2023). In this aim, this study employs a multi-sited ethnographic approach grounded in the methods of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon2004) that builds on the conceptual principles of mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Norris & Jones Reference Norris and Rodney2005: see also Lamb Reference Lamb2024). This approach problematizes and opens up ‘the social’ in social action as a more-than-human entry point for discourse analysis. For the analysis of semiotic landscapes, this means that I approach multispecies encounters, social bonds, alliances, identities, friendships, kinships, communities, and landscapes themselves as social actions, where ethnographic inquiry aims to illuminate the temporal rhythms, scalar practices, and affordances for further action these entangling (inter)actions enable. I argue this multispecies approach to discourse analysis opens up our understanding of ‘discourse’ and ‘the social’ in post-anthropocentric directions as the meaningful activity-spaces enlivened by the (inter)activities and projects of diverse human and nonhuman beings, and the unfolding dynamics of adaptation and resistance to one another’s projects.

To develop this approach, I draw on the concept of ‘surveillant landscapes’ (Jones Reference Jones2017:150), which also builds on principles of mediated discourse analysis to examine ‘the aspects of built environments that are designed to make people and their actions visible and legible’. This approach brings focus to how the built landscape of cities agentively ‘communicates surveillance’ to render urban inhabitants legible and visible to neoliberal state power, and to reliably (re)generate dominant communicative practices, identities, and social relations accordingly. Yet when I swim in the ocean, I have the sensation of being watched and read by other beings in ways that reveal a similarly agentive, shared, and potentially dangerous ‘non-built’ ecological surveillant landscape, where both convivial and predator-prey relations abound. This recognition should offer an initial invitation into exploring a more expansive understanding of the semiotic landscape as a space of human and nonhuman co-shaping, co-adaptation, and co-resistance.

So, to push this framework of surveillant landscapes in more post-anthropocentric directions, I bring it into further dialogue with approaches to assemblage thinking in multispecies studies (Tsing Reference Tsing2015; du Plessis Reference du Plessis2022) and sociolinguistics (Cornips et al. Reference Cornips, Deumert, Pennycook, Vandenbroucke, Declercq, Brisard and D’Hondt2024; Pietikäinen Reference Pietikäinen2024). These approaches develop the relational philosophies of Deleuze & Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1980/Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) and multispecies studies (Haraway Reference Haraway2008; Tsing Reference Tsing2015) to contest anthropocentric nature/culture divisions and the human-centric modes of social and semiotic analysis these divisions tend to produce. As Haraway (Reference Haraway2004:238) writes, ‘People are always already in assemblage with worlds. Humans are congeries of things that are not us. We are not self-identical’. This basic recognition of human-nonhuman entanglement calls for ethnographic approaches in sociolinguistic research attuned to the ecological, technological, and socio-material knots of multispecies co-existence and co-functioning (Pietikäinen Reference Pietikäinen2024). In exploring landscape assemblages in the Digital Anthropocene, then, as Tsing (Reference Tsing2015:163) suggests, it becomes apparent that landscapes are also ‘scenes for considering livability—the possibility of common life on a human-disturbed earth’. In this aim, central principles guiding assemblage thinking across these studies, and that I seek to carry forward in this article, include (i) challenging singular, human-centered accounts of landscapes to clarify the multiplicity of human-nonhuman relations that compose them, (ii) an emphasis on the productive qualities of assemblages for maintaining and reinforcing encounters for particular purposes (e.g. wildlife conservation), and (iii) the political futures a distinct assemblage opens up, where the human and nonhuman beings caught up in an assemblage (e.g. of tourism commodification or conservation control and care) all have stakes in the futures that different assemblages of technology, governance discourse, and human-nonhuman relations make more or less possible.

The empirical research I examine below draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork that is currently on-going across several field sites on O‘ahu beginning in 2016. The data below draws from this fieldwork involving participant observation with marine wildlife volunteers, semi-structured and walking interviews with conservation practitioners, tourists, and other stakeholders in tourism, and conservation activities that converge around these animals, as well as field notes, photographs, and video recordings of human-wildlife interactions, and analysis of social and news media coverage, particularly focusing on controversies around wildlife harassment erupting in local media. Engaging in this fieldwork has also involved participating in a range of roles, including as a wildlife conservation volunteer, a wildlife tourist, a social scientist consultant, and a citizen scientist. This multi-modal data collection strategy aligned with nexus analysis principles by examining how discourses and bodies, both human and nonhuman, converge in particular times and places to produce the multispecies interaction orders that are generating the distinct more-than-human actions, identities, social relationships, and communities that are the focus of this article.

I argue that this approach, grounded in mediated discourse analysis and informed by concerns in multispecies studies with the forms of digital intimacy increasingly mediating human relations with other-than-human beings and the wider abodes we share together, can open new avenues of inquiry for ecologically engaged LL researchers into the various more-than-human semiotic landscapes that are generating distinct human-wildlife identities and social relationships in Hawai‘i and around the world in consequential ways. I suggest that this framework enables us to investigate not only how these relationships form and function, but also their broader implications for post-anthropocentric approaches to the semiotic landscape that explores possibilities for multispecies flourishing in an increasingly digitally mediated and ecologically uncertain world. The multispecies approach to LL research explored here responds to recent calls from LL scholars to grapple with the implications of the Anthropocene (Kosatica & Smith Reference Kosatica and Sean2025) by opening up new avenues of inquiry into more-than-human semiotic landscape projects in the ‘Digital Anthropocene’.

In the section below, I examine the modes of digital surveillance that increasingly shape human-monk seal entanglements in Hawai‘i. The central questions I seek to address are: (i) How are digital surveillance technologies and practices generating new possibilities for semiotic landscapes of multispecies intimacy between humans and monk seals? And more broadly, (ii) how do these digitally mediated encounters open up (or foreclose) possibilities for more ethically responsive modes of human-wildlife coexistence in a time of overwhelming mass extinction and ecological degradation? While my fieldwork on monk seal-human landscapes involves engaging with people participating in a range of more or less official institutional roles associated with the species’ conservation, such as conservation volunteers or state wildlife managers, my focus here is on the public’s participation in wildlife surveillance efforts aimed at protecting monk seals involving a number of potential roles. von Essen and colleagues (Reference von Essen, Turnbull, Searle, Jørgensen, Hofmeester and van der Wal2023:680) provide a useful typology capturing three broad roles through which the public participates in digital wildlife surveillance discourses and practices:

Interestingly, however, the authors do not discuss social media as a relevant surveillant technology, which in my own fieldwork is becoming an increasingly important source of public-produced knowledge used by researchers to track, surveil, and learn about monk seal behavior for the purposes of conservation. The nature of social media platforms through which publics can rapidly form around a set of shared concerns (e.g. the problem of monk seal harassment, or the charisma of an individual monk seal’s personality like ‘Rocky’ or ‘Honey Girl’) suggests the need to understand how the three categories of producer, consumer, and intervener discussed above emerge within the particular projects of different ‘monk seal publics’, especially as these publics develop around an assemblage of competing values, ethical orientations, and political aims. In the case of Hawaiian monk seals, as I discuss in greater depth below, a number of different groups with their own online presence on social media and blogs have emerged over the years to monitor monk seals, with participants often engaging in all three roles that von Essen and colleagues (2003) identify. In sum, returning to the metaphorical lens of magnetic landscapes, I seek to explore how people’s participation in conservation surveillance technologies—focusing on the affordances of social media for public forms of wildlife surveillance—draws people into new forms of digital intimacy (and abstraction) with wildlife while these forms of digital intimacy are simultaneously ‘pulling’ human and seals into distinct futures of co-existence.

Surveilling monk seals

The Hawaiian monk seal (Neomonachus schauinslandi), with current population estimates indicating approximately 1,600 individuals remaining in the wild, is one of the most endangered species in the world, with their primary habitat, as well as the primary biological fieldsite for their monitoring their recovery, located in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, about 500 miles northwest of the Main Hawaiian Islands. While the species maintains its primary population center in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a smaller but growing cohort has established itself in the main Hawaiian Islands, totaling around 400 seals. The species faces multifaceted threats, particularly in human-populated areas where disturbance during critical life activities poses a significant risk. While the species has shown a promising population recovery, this success is also generating new challenges for coexistence with humans.

Monk seal–human relations reveal a dynamic multispecies landscape (Lamb Reference Lamb2024) where debates about ethical human-seal encounters emerge from multiple discursive tensions around the conservation of the species. At the core of these tensions, argue Konrad, Levine, Leong, & Koethe (Reference Konrad, Levine, Leong and Koethe2024), lie four distinct monk seal discourses: (i) as a vulnerable species requiring protection, (ii) as a resource competitor for local fisheries, (iii) as a symbol of governmental overreach and colonial dispossession for some Native Hawaiians, and (iv) as a perceived invasive species despite archaeological evidence of historical presence. As the authors go on to note, ‘As [Hawaiian monk seal] populations rebound towards recovery and interactions become more frequent, people will increasingly need to make sense of these novel types of encounters. The encounters themselves are not inherently good or bad; they are weighted through human values that determine their importance and whether the impacts from those interactions are valued on the whole as positive or negative’ (2024:2). For instance, the circulation of social media of harassment of monk seals has often incited public outrage about unethical tourism as local media circulate social-media-amplified incidents of tourist harassment of endangered wildlife (see Figures 1 and 2 below).

Figure 1.

Viral images and video of tourist harassment of protected wildlife in Hawai‘i. Left: A 2017 Instagram post showing two men holding and posing with a sea turtle. The image generated widespread outrage on social media and in local news media, resulting in $750 fines for both men. Right: A 2021 TikTok video showing a woman touching a monk seal. The video went viral and received extensive local and national media coverage as an incident of tourist harassment of an endangered species, leading to a $500 fine.

Figure 2.

News headlines in local Hawai‘i news media of incidents of sea turtle and monk seal ‘harassment’.

One deeper challenge in this context, however, is that at least sixteen documented cases of monk seal killings have been recorded since 2009, primarily on Moloka‘i and Kaua‘i. Konrad and colleagues’ (Reference Konrad, Levine, Leong and Koethe2024) study on public attitudes towards monk seals reveal a broadly positive public affective stance towards monk seals, but incidents of violence towards the species suggest successful endangered species recovery programs will need to navigate not only ecological conservation challenges but also longstanding attitudes of mistrust towards government conservation efforts seen as extensions of colonial relations with Indigenous and local people. It is within these competing landscape assemblages of human–monk seal relationships that I have explored how forms of ‘digital intimacy’ are increasingly shaping human-seal encounters along Hawai‘i’s coastlines.

In what follows, I explore how digital intimacy is finding expression in a growing network of collaborating and competing ‘amateur’ monk seal groups that enlist digital modes of monk seal surveillance to care for this species, but where this digitally mediated care is also generating new tensions around what constitutes legitimate care for monk seals.

Over the past decade, several monk seal groups have developed an online presence to post images of monk seal sightings and keep track of seals’ life history narratives on blogs and Facebook groups to promote understanding and care for the small population of monk seals in the Main Hawaiian Islands who are identified by both identification codes (KP2) and community-given names (Rocky). In an interview with one veteran conservation volunteer involved in monk seal conservation activities for over a decade, I discovered the complex and at times friction-filled relationships between these groups as different members sought to advance competing visions of care for monk seals. These Facebook groups range in size from a couple of hundred members to a couple of thousand members, with the earliest one being established in 2017 and the most recent one in the beginning of 2024. Social media platforms create affordances for novel assemblages of civilian monitors, enabling what one federal manager described to me as spaces of ‘competing information’ where seal location data and documentation become forms of social capital. There is at times a tension between federal agencies’ guarded approach to sharing seal data and the tendency of these social media groups’ emphasis on public sharing of seal information and sightings, a tension that exemplifies how digital platforms are both democratizing, but also creating competing assemblages of care (Giraud Reference Giraud2019). For instance, as with social media discussed above, these platforms have been an important source for reporting perceived transgressors of protected species guidelines and laws, such as when tourists touch or otherwise harass wildlife (e.g. Figure 1). However, as competing visions of care emerged within these groups over the years, they have splintered off into multiple groups with distinct social media practices and forms of digital intimacy.

For instance, the distinct regimes of care that state monk seal conservation governance promotes manifest in practices like controlled information sharing, standardized surveillance protocols, and what one federal manager I interviewed described as the avoidance of ‘anthropomorphizing’ individuals, or the tendency to project human thoughts, emotions, and characteristics onto monk seals. Friction that emerges here between official and unofficial monk seal surveillance efforts is illustrative of one of the paradoxes discussed by von Essen and colleagues (Reference von Essen, Turnbull, Searle, Jørgensen, Hofmeester and van der Wal2023), involving a tension between centralized conservation management and emerging distributed citizen monitoring. Over the years, the citizen monk seal groups have developed internal guidelines to police their network for violations of group protocols, such as ‘No posting of seal locations or photos/videos that show the location of a seal in its current location’. Sharing the location of a monk seal in real-time risks attracting people to its location, and is viewed as an unethical practice within these groups, leading to challenges with how best to track and surveil monk seals in ways that protect them from becoming targets of over-appreciation. In this way, these online citizen communities foster modes of digital intimacy at both a spatial and temporal distance. This reveals a further paradox of proximity/detachment in emerging modes of digital intimacy that generate an array of practices of caring at a distance, and that operate within what Jones (Reference Jones2020:91) has explored as the distinct ‘infrastructures of accountability’ that emerge under regimes of surveillance practices: ‘social expectations about the rights and responsibilities of different participants and about what to do when these expectations are breeched’.

Attention to digital entanglement between humans and other species calls for modes analysis attuned to the forms of ‘passionate immersion’ (Tsing Reference Tsing2010) taking shape within them, as Tsing writes about in her ethnography of networks of mushroom lovers. Here, the ‘cold heart’ of objective science is overtaken by what Tsing calls the multispecies love of curiosity about the world that nature-loving groups cultivate through increasingly refined ‘arts of noticing’. Consider the images below (Figure 3) from a monk seal blog that has been tracking the movements of monk seals for over fifteen years. The blog is dedicated to posting ‘dailies’ or daily updates of monk seal activity in Hawai‘i, as the members contribute their photos each day of new monk seal sightings, the creator of the blog told me in our interview. As I learned, what initially started as an appreciation blog, as the creator “became very passionate about the monk seals when I realized how endangered they are”, steadily turned into a more dedicated tracking project over the years and they became more actively engaged with monk seal conservation efforts. The contributors to the blog, or ‘the monk seal posse’, have become extremely proficient in identifying and sharing the identity of monk seals that appear across Hawai‘i’s beaches on the blog, often accompanying the posts with facts about the life histories of individual monk seals. Indeed, for Lei Ola (the monk seal on the right in Figure 3, escaping in the water from a dog) is a monk seal who had lost her pup to a dog attack before. The blog poster’s familiarity with this seal’s past experience with dog attacks allows them to note on the blog that “of course this was stressful” for the seal, enduring yet another dog attack after the traumatic loss of her pup to dogs. Over the years, this and similar posts populate the blog making it a rich repository of knowledge about monk seal ways of being and doing revealing a form of digital intimacy fostered within this epistemic community of citizen monk seal trackers.

Figure 3.

Two posts of ‘dailies’ from the monk seal blog. Left: a post on updates about the monk seal ‘Kermit’ who has been fitted with a Crittercam to record his underwater foraging practices. Right: a blog post documenting a dog that was let off-leash by their owner, chasing the monk seal, Lei Ola, off the beach, which the blog notes was a seal who had lost her pup to a dog attack a few months prior.

In my interviews with a long-time monk seal ‘enthusiast’ as she referred to herself, who had volunteered with monk seal conservation groups for several years and is also a follower/member of this blog and several of the monk seal Facebook groups, she raised concerns about the forms of interspecies intimacy that certain online modes of entanglement with monk seals enable. As she put it, “I think seal enthusiasts sometimes become adrift in their conservation efforts, and there grows a sense of possession or connection that makes us all behave in inconsistent ways towards their true conservation. I think that is why almost all of the truly passionate monk seal people end up getting kicked out of the conservation groups, especially official conservation groups, at some point. They just care too much and in a way that ultimately, is not helpful or at least at some point causes some sort of conflict”. Indeed, over the years a number of different monk seal online groups have formed primarily on Facebook, splintering off from one another as their members navigate conflicting modes of expressing care for seals.

Early on in my research as I began following several monk seal Facebook groups, I sensed differences in the way members of different groups sanctioned different modes of digital intimacy associated with ‘anthropomorphic’ portrayals of monk seals, such as in the posts my interviewee shared with me below (Figure 4). This particular group was first created to follow and share updates of a livestream of a monk seal pupping event at a popular Waikiki beach in 2017, but had since evolved into a blog tracking monk seal sightings throughout Hawai‘i posting infrequently at about eight to ten times per month (see also von Essen & Peterson Reference von Essen and Peterson2024). Most of the images posted to the group are primarily photographers sharing sightings of monk seals, or official monk seal press releases on relocations or rehabilitation updates from NOAA or other government conservation agencies. In my interviews with wildlife managers, the concerns about some monk seal enthusiasts’ forms of care resonated with a discourse managers expressed of illegitimate ways of knowing sea turtles and monk seals. As Giraud (Reference Giraud2019:100) notes, this conservation discourse of knowing animals in the right way is often bound together ‘with particular modes of care’, and portrayals of activist or wildlife enthusiasts as often ‘caring in the wrong way’. From this perspective, wildlife care is entangled with forms of knowledge politics that has long valorized ‘modest witnessing’ (Haraway Reference Haraway1997) in conservation as a mode caring for animals that values ‘particular ways of knowing as objective, neutral and emotionally disengaged’ (Giraud, Reference Giraud2019:112). Here, arguments in wildlife conservation about animal lovers and enthusiasts caring in the wrong way are often tied to a hierarchy of care in which the forms of expert knowledge generated through working directly with wildlife, a proximal care gate kept by conservation professionals, is juxtaposed with an ‘abstract care grounded in “Disneyfied” conceptions of animals, which is presented as having no place in rational debate’ (2019:116).

Figure 4.

Examples of the forms of digital intimacy circulated in social media posts by a monk seal advocacy group.

I argue that digital intimacy foregrounds and undoes traditional hierarchies of care in human-wildlife relations in how digital intimacy troubles the relation between caring and knowing in ways not previously possible. At least the forms of intimacy emerging in digitally mediated networks of monk seal enthusiasts is gnawing at the boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ conservation regimes, and in the process, offer a reconsideration of the forms of expertise and care most needed for monk seals in a time when the species is reclaiming beaches and is requiring people to respond by exploring experimental modes of co-habitation, or at times, violent unwelcoming. My aim here, in part, is to contribute to theoretical discussions of more-than-human regimes of care in the Anthropocene (Puig de la Bellacasa Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017) by examining how digital technologies are transforming traditional divisions between ‘professional’ and ‘vernacular’ conservation practices (Lorimer Reference Lorimer2007). Attending to these identities and communities emerging at the nexus of human-monk seal entanglements in Hawai‘i suggests the need for sociolinguistic frameworks in the Digital Anthropocene that shed light on how multispecies care operates through digitally-enabled communities of care that take shape around threatened species and places.

In exploring how monk seal-human relations are taking shape amidst emerging practices of digital tracking and surveillance, especially through the affordances that these online communities make possible, the digital intimacy fostered in these networks suggests more democratic possibilities for generating forms of multispecies intimacy. As Janicka (Reference Janicka2023:36) argues, ‘the notion of resources produced by amateur-experts that are shared on the internet through blogs, forums, groups, and associations… operate within “gift culture” as vectors of sensibilization that enrich our relations to living beings, as an alternative to the “technocratic expertise” that is often proposed in their stead (Morizot Reference Morizot2020:286–87)’. Similarly, we might explore the forms of intimacy taking shape in digital entanglements among people and monk seals in Hawai‘i, and elsewhere in the world, as emerging cultures of multispecies sensibilization that can enrich human-wildlife relations outside of official conservation discourse, while also recognizing the potential risk of these practices to fragment collective efforts at species recovery into competing modes of care. In other words, rather than seeing these digital tracking practices of enthusiasts as simply alternatives to institutional conservation, we might better explore how practices of digital intimacy in the Anthropocene are opening up experimental spaces of knowing and caring through ‘techniques, infrastructures, institutions, and environments that would favour life-affirming co-articulation for humans and nonhumans’ (Janicka Reference Janicka2023:36).

Discussion and conclusion

In this study, I have sought to suggest ways to explore how, as digital technologies are enabling new forms of wildlife tracking and surveillance, digital practices are reconfiguring the multispecies semiotic landscape through which human and nonhuman beings come to know, be affected by, and navigate future possibilities for living together in a time of immense socio-ecological change and uncertainty. The Digital Anthropocene, as I have explored it here, refers to our contemporary moment in which digital surveillance technologies are generating new forms of interspecies intimacy, care, and control. I’ve suggested that this era is characterized by the emergence of ‘magnetic landscapes’: spaces where digital infrastructures act as attractors that pull humans and nonhumans into shared but contested futures, generating paradoxical possibilities for flourishing cohabitation and intensified forms of surveillance and commodification.

Finally, in challenging anthropocentric thinking, the approach to wildlife surveillant landscapes explored here entails more than just a re-enchantment project to treat nonhuman beings and processes as actors in our analyses. Rather, it suggests the need to attend to the overflowing richness of ways of being in the world, human and nonhuman, that participate in and shape human subjectivities, social bonds, and landscape relations (Guattari Reference Guattari1989/Reference Guattari2014), and in ways that will likely always exceed our methods to fully capture these processes (Calarco Reference Calarco2020). With climate change, people and wildlife are being brought into unpredictable and novel relationships involving both forms of co-adaptation and co-flourishing, as well as violent responses of refusal to welcome others (van Dooren Reference van Dooren2016). In this ecologically degrading, ethically fraught, and digitally transformative context, this article suggested a post-anthropocentric sociolinguistic approach for examining how digital intimacy is reconfiguring multispecies relationships under expanding semiotic landscapes of environmental surveillance.