Streaming Precarity: The Polar Bear Cam and the Display of Migration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".