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What would it take to establish a take-back scheme for fishing gear? Insights from a comparative analysis of fishing gear and beverage containers

The technological mediation of near and distant landscapes have long fascinated scholars and the public alike, and it seems like this interest peaks around times of large-scale technological transition, when new modes of both transportation and mediation become available. Few scholars have analyzed this relationship between technology, media, and the perception of landscape as convincingly as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, who famously argued that the landscape perceived by travelers was filtered through the machine ensemble of the railroad system. This article brings Schivelbusch's thesis into the digital age as a way of examining the spatiality of digital media and the natural world. The article analyzes a series of technologically mediated digital representations of travel and movement through landscapes, in particular the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's “slow travel” series of digitally enhanced TV programs. These highly popular mediations of railroad or boat travel challenge Schivelbusch's ideas of speed, distance, and experience of landscapes, but also direct our attention towards the role of digital media in making sense of a changing world.

Digital surveillance technologies enable a range of publics to observe the private lives of wild animals. Publics can now encounter wildlife from their smartphones, home computers, and other digital devices. These technologies generate public-wildlife relations that produce digital intimacy, but also summon wildlife into relations of care, commodification, and control. Via three case studies, this paper examines the biopolitical implications of such technologically mediated human-animal relations, which are becoming increasingly common and complex in the Digital Anthropocene. Each of our case studies involves a different biopolitical rationale deployed by a scientific-managerial regime: (1) clampdown (wild boar); (2) care (golden eagle); and (3) control (moose). Each of these modalities of biopower, however, is entangled with the other, inaugurating complex relations between publics, scientists, and wildlife. We show how digital technologies can predetermine certain representations of wildlife by encouraging particular gazes, which can have negative repercussions for public-wildlife relations in both digital and offline spaces. However, there remains work to be done to understand the positive public-wildlife relations inaugurated by digital mediation. Here, departing from much extant literature on digital human-animal relations, we highlight some of these positive potentials, notably: voice, immediacy, and agency.