Abstract
This paper contextualizes the social media(tion) of global cheetah conservation and examines how representations of extinction are ‘spectacularized’ and used to leverage global money and power. ‘Spectacles of extinction’ flow quickly over social media platforms; specifically, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, gaining support, followers, and funding for conservation efforts in Namibia. This paper draws from thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Namibia and two years of online data collection and examines the chasm between spectacularized extinction online and conservation realities in Namibia, pointing to the problem of mediating conservation politics over social media. The Namibia-based cheetah conservation NGOs in this study focus their efforts at the international level. Their global marketing campaigns to #SaveTheCheetah are circulated over mass media, social media, and other communication platforms and technologies to engage global audiences and mobilize attention to cheetahs’ global #RaceAgainstExtinction. This paper argues that by mediating conservation politics online, cheetah conservation NGOs conflate and confuse raising money and awareness with effective action. Framing extinction as something that can be solved by global audiences over social media reinforces economic, informational, and power asymmetries in conservation.
Highlights
Screen culture and new visual media, communication platforms, and technologies are making it easier to access and communicate environ mental crises at the global scale
This paper argues that the way conservation politics is mediated over social media conflates and confuses raising money and awareness with effective action
This paper examines the chasm between spectacularized extinction online and the political realities of conservation in Namibia, pointing to the problem of mediating conservation politics over social media
Summary
Screen culture and new visual media, communication platforms, and technologies are making it easier to access and communicate environ mental crises at the global scale. When extinction is sold online, it undermines effective political action and transformative change in conservation Why this is of particular importance is that, for cheetahs, it is not the fear of extinction in Namibia per se, rather, it is the fear of losing funding for the NGOs, that dictates how cheetahs’ #RaceAgainstExtinction is represented over social media. Global claims of #extinction capitalize on what Giroux (2016) describes as ‘stylized political action’ where such likes, posts, tweets, and shares distract global audiences through the ‘theatricality of power’ (Giroux, 2016) This ‘theatricality of power’ is how the NGOs raise awareness, attention, and funding and engage global audiences in the politics of conservation. In addition to a political ecology framework, this paper draws from media and communication studies (Castells 1996; Dean 2005; Fuchs 2017; Tufekci 2017; Odell 2019) as social media is fundamental in the pro duction, reproduction, circulation, and amplification of the spectacle of extinction and can be useful to political ecology discourse
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