Streaming Precarity: The Polar Bear Cam and the Display of Migration

• Published in: TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
• Main Author: Lafontaine, Constance
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2015
• Subjects: Canada; Endeavour; Churchill; polar bear
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/topia.32.135; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/topia.32.135

The figure of the polar bear is used more extensively than any other faunal or floral species as the image through which to express and communicate human anxiety about the effects of global warming on the North. This paper considers representations of polar bears in Canada by discussing the spectacularization of the animal afforded by the Polar Bear Cam, a live online stream of the species’ yearly migration near Churchill, Manitoba. The Polar Bear Cam, like several other popular contemporary representations of the polar bear, has been conjugated within a discourse of global warming. Precarity, threats of extinction and impending death operate as impetuses for the display and viewing of the animal. This article considers some points that arise at this intersection of sight and survival and argues that the Polar Bear Cam operates within an anthropocentric framework. In several ways, the Polar Bear Cam symbolically cements the animal as a being that is removed from the human, both geographically and ontologically. Even beyond its own endeavour of visual commodification, the cam is complicit with a system that is predicated on a sustained and institutionalized subjugation of the non-human. By discussing the polar-bear tourism industry in Churchill, I explore how spectacular displays of wildlife efface the complex ways in which humans and polar bears are connected.