Swimming with sharks: Drones, social media and ocean relationalities

Shifts toward more relational understandings of human-shark encounters among ocean users (e.g., swimmers and surfers) have been emerging in Australia. Alongside community debates about shark nets, culls, whale migration, over-fishing and the growing numbers of ocean users in attacks and encounters, many ocean-users have articulated more nuanced understandings of sharks, which challenge the biased representations of shark behaviours represented in various media and policy realms. Drawing on ethnographic research that includes fieldwork, interviews and social media analysis, in this discussion, I explore the effects of drone footage of human-shark encounters on social media on how ocean users, like swimmers and surfers, think about their relationships to sharks. Following ecofeminists like Val Plumwood (e.g., 2012) and Deborah Bird-Rose (e.g., 2015), I am interested in the ethical effects and affects of how these alternative representations of human-shark encounters is ‘resituating’ people in how they think about themselves as part of both multispecies and technologized ocean ecologies. In this way, drone footage that is shared on social media is part of a ‘digital Anthropocene’ that is changing understandings of human–environment relations and how we live together and is changing how people observe, access and relate to wild animals. Providing a non-human view from above, drone footage and social media are ever more deeply entangled in how we related to the living world in these human-induced times of climate change, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, mineral extraction, and energy transition. Most significantly, they might support new forms of human (swimmer and surfer) relations with sharks that disrupt dominant ‘shark as predator’ representations and challenge the need for human-centric and ecologically destructive shark bite mitigation interventions and policies.