From selfie to #sealfie: Nature 2.0 and the digital cultural politics of an internationally contested resource

This paper examines an iteration of debate about seal hunting in Canada wherein the politics of nature and celebrity culture intersected via Web 2.0 in an unanticipated way. Our analysis focuses on a spike in social media posting that took place after celebrity Ellen DeGeneres took a 'selfie' photo with a group of movie stars live during the 2014 Academy Awards. 'Nature 2.0' is a relevant framing for this case because, in the weeks and months after the 2014 Oscars, many seal hunters and other pro-hunt advocates took to Twitter and posted personal photos and/or accounts of seal hunting and its significance. In a play on DeGeneres' Oscars selfie, both types of posters often labelled their tweets with the following 'hashtag': #sealfie. Our analysis shows that, while important, the Oscars spectacle and the star-studded selfie did not alone the scene for #sealfies and their circulation. Moreover, we demonstrate that some #sealfie posters challenged the authority of anti-sealing organizations and employed Web 2.0 functionalities in ways that took debate about sealing beyond engrained moral and environmental binaries. We conclude that Web 2.0 not just enabled, but actually shaped, the form and function of #sealfies and the journalistic attention that the phenomenon received.