“Chinese Elm 1030595… (or Can I Call You Dale??)”: Interspecies Communication, Intimacy, and Response-Ability

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - II

Abstract

In recent decades, nonhumans have increasingly garnered scholarly interest, leading to the emergence of novel and often interdisciplinary understandings of how humans encounter and relate to animals. Situated as part of this “animal turn,” this paper engages with the human urge to enter into communicative exchanges that implicate “other” entities as it is enacted through digital interfaces. What is at stake, analytically and ethically in emailing an elm tree?  Given that humans may wish to interact but the interlocutors “themselves” are on offer only in a mediated form, what are the meaningful elements of these communicative acts, epistemically and morally?

Taking as axiomatic that human and non-human entities are in a state of partial connection “alongside” partial division (Latimer 2013), we use sites of anthropomorphized, zoopomorphized, and botanomorphized digital interfaces to explore how digitally mediated, short-form communication constructs intimacy and intelligibility between species (including a municipal experiment with residents emailing city trees; and plants and seals “tweeting”). Following an approach informed by critical animal and media studies as well as science and technology studies, this paper analyzes the circumstances around these communicative acts as well as their enablers and objectives, and argues that placing “natural” entities in a central role in communicative exchange is potentially a way to cultivate empathy and cross-species care at a time when this empathy is urgently necessary (Haraway 2016). However, because communicative exchange can also ensure that humans’ needs to other, dominate and control representation are met, the paper also discusses limitations in mediated, trans-species translation, and the effects this type of technological mediation has on the perceived agency of other species.

Authors

• Maria Soledad Altrudi, University of Southern California

• Christina Dunbar-Hester, University of Southern California

• Kate M. Miltner, University of Southern California