In The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (2003) and its extension, When Species Meet (2008), Haraway introduces her notion of companion species, which she uses to describe the kinship of different species, who are joined together as significant others. She argues that this relationship represents the current implosion of nature and culture (natureculture), as well as the lack of distinction between humans, technology and animals (human-nonhuman). Haraway (2003:16) explains that companion species are complex, co-constitutional, impure and history specific. This makes it a significant concept to consider with various aspects and applications.

 

The definition of companion species also becomes evident in the combination of companionand species. To have a companion means to be accompanied by something or someone, with a sense of reciprocation (Haraway 2008:17). In turn, Haraway (2008:17) attaches species to the Latin word respecere,arguing that it implies a joint sense of respect and registering of each other. She also uses species in terms of its historical, broader meaning, which “gestures to particular ways of life and to any relevant gathering of kin” (Van Dooren et al. 2016:5). Species do not merely refer to complex categories of beings, but also denotes different methods of regarding other entities. In this manner, companion species is not identified as a means of classification or taxonomical grouping (Van Dooren et al. 2016:5), but rather a way of regarding one another (Jordan 2011:266). Jordan (2011:268) maintains, Haraway’s concept of companion species must be used as a “divination or thinking tool … to pry open how we make our worlds in concert with other beings, especially those whose species may not seem obviously to be the same as our own species”. My exploration therefore values companion species in all its complexity and critically considers its use as a ‘thinking tool’ to understand the binding of human and nonhuman others. That is to say, interpreting being-withand becoming within the world, in turn, interprets companionship.

 

Haraway (2003:12) finds that implicit in the syntax of companion species is the idea that companion species exist as a plural – species cannot be singular. Equally, the etymology of the term ‘companion’ (com – together with and panis – bread) stresses the required two-getherness of entities. As a result, companion species are about a relating, a partnership, which cannot exist without components associating with one another. There has to be (at least) two partners in a relationship to be considered companion species. Moreover, Haraway (2003:18) argues that these two companion species are tied to specificity and the actual fleshy acts of relating, i.e. the ‘on-the-ground’ empirical interactions between beings. Accordingly, Haraway focuses her work on such a partnership of companion species by exploring the particular relation between two specific species: humans and dogs. For Haraway, the specific relationship between human beings and dogs is the ultimate manifestation of companion species. She takes the “‘dog-human’ relationships seriously” and explores how “our shared histories with dogs might inform a more mutual and therefore ethical basis for relationships between all kinds of entities” (Cassidy 2003:324). Following Haraway, we can therefore add to the definition of companion species arguing that it is best exemplified by the companionship of humans and dogs, which manifests in contemporary society.

 

It is important to note, however, that although Haraway uses the idea of human-dog relations to think through issues in the Anthropocene she maintains that dogs are the critical point of her argument and not other species. She explains, “dogs are not an alibi for other themes” (2003:5) and highlights that her main interest is in these specific animals. In an interview with Wolfgang Shirmacher (in Cassidy 2003, emphasis added), Haraway makes this notion clear:

WS: … we don’t want to know who the dogs are, we just want to know who we are.

DH:Who is this we?

WS:We, you and me.

DH:I want to know about the dogs.

WS:Not really.

DH:Honest, really true.

WS:You do the same thing that Heidegger once advised: If you want to know about humanity look away from humanity.

DH:That’s all well and good but I also want to know about the dogs.      

 

Haraway wants to know about dogs, in other words she wants to know about the act of humans living with dogs, the actual connection between these specific beings, how the relation manifests, why it occurs and how human-dog relations become immersed in various scales of time, body and space of the Anthropocene. She concentrates on the distinct physical presence and meaning of dogs. For Haraway, dogs are not used as an allegory for other aspects of being human; they are what matters and what manifests. 

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Picturing or visualising the human-animal relation – specifically the human-dog relation – is an age-old phenomenon, most prominently portrayed through art, photography and cinema. Ever since the first prehistoric paintings on cave walls, man has drawn out its relation with and observations of animals. Notably, even in these early paintings we find representations of canines and wolves (Sutton 2017:92).  In other words, since primitive times humans have used the realm of the visual to express and represent their complex relations and existence with animals and, in particular, also their relations with their dogs. As a result, animals (especially dogs) have featured in a variety of ways throughout the canon of art history, photography and other visual imagery, such as film. 

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Evidently, the depiction of animals in the visual realm has shifted alongside our alternating understanding of the human-animal relation and animal subject. That is to say, the visual animal has been subjected to the understanding of the animal as liminal and spiritual in primitive times (Berger 1977:18), subsequently becoming an anthropocentric symbol in medieval and classical art (Pastoureau 2017:10) and finally, in postmodern art, the animal becomes an agent actively involved in the visual image: “The postmodern animal is there in the gallery not as a meaning or a symbol but in all its pressing thingness … it passes itself off as the fact of reality of that which resists both interpretation and mediocrity” (Baker 2000:82).

 

Echoing the history of the animal and the visual image, the representation of the dog in images has also shifted according to the various viewpoints of the human-dog relation. Said another way, “[i]n all these grand domains of our cultural history, dogs, when experienced and recorded by human beings who are also artists, play essential parts” (Rosenblum1988:10). As humans we have recorded, mirrored, expressed and solidified our relation to dogs throughout history through images, including art and photography. 

 

For instance, in ancient and medieval times, the dog appears as a global symbol alongside humans in mythological images, signifying a variety of ideas from spirituality, divine Beings and fertility to companionship, safety and sinister powers (Rowland 1974:58-61). In turn, in the eighteenth century the dog appears in paintings as companion to the privileged man and symbol of his class or social status, as, for example, the dog is pictured accompanying monarchs during royal hunts. Additionally, we find that dogs are often depicted as symbols of domestication and the overwhelming anthropocentrism of the human centred Age of Enlightenment (Rosenblum 1988:17;20). Moreover, during this time, in various images the dog is used as an icon to represent human experiences ranging from fidelity to human desolation. We also encounter the dog in art as a loyal servant to its human master, signifying man’s superiority as well as the dog’s supposed devotion and selflessness (Rosenblum 1988:67). Finally, in postmodernism, the dog gains a sense of agency in images and prompts humans to respond to the world from the dog’s-eye-view, to such an extent that we even encounter the dog itself as art (Sutton 2017:84).  

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Merritt (2018:8) eloquently summarises the extent and history of the depiction of dogs in art:

"As the arts elucidate the fine lines and fault lines of our lives, they also inform us of the relationship between man and dog. Drawn in French caves, entombed in Egypt, enshrined in China, dogs have always served art as subject and symbol. Early painters such as Velàzquez and Titian included dogs in their paintings. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that the great portrait painters began to express man’s love for dogs and at the same time to capture their nobility. Hogarth, Gainsborough and Landseer majestically rendered canine presence in the family of man. The tradition, once started, continues. Today, we see the dogs as an important element in the works of our leading artists, from Picasso to Salle, from Monet to Fischl."

 

 

Ensuing the dog in art, picturing the dog through the medium of photography is also a vital manner of representing the human-dog relation. Merritt (2018:8-9) explains that the development and popularity of the camera coincides with the change of thinking surrounding the human-dog relation from anthropocentrism towards nonhumanism. That is to say, “both canis familiaris and camera obscura [simultaneously] experienced rapid absorption into the fabric of human life” and, consequently photographs of dogs “speak as much about the history of photography as they do about man’s and dog’s evolving relationship” (Merritt 2018:8; 9). Currently, taking photos of dogs has become the most prominent manner to capture the human-dog relation. In fact, Merritt (2018:9) notes that for some photographers, taking photos of dogs is somewhat of an obsessive pursuit – a fixation mirrored in the amount of photos dog owners seem to take from day-to-day. In fact, a 2017 report from Rover.com reveals that 65% of dog owners confess to taking more photos of their dog than their significant other (Varnier 2019). 

 

Following this line of thought, we can explore the depiction of the dog (and other animals) mediated through an endless number of visual examples and mediums. Although it is not my intention to expand on the history of the image of the dog in art and photography further than this brief contextualisation, I argue that what the history of the dog in visual culture emphasises is that humans are inclined to picturetheir experiences and relations with their companion species. Hence, we can learn about the human-dog relation by examining such instances. Furthermore, echoing Derrida’s look at his cat in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) (2004[1997]) and Berger’s Why Look At Animals? (1977), it is clear that humans lookat animals, especially dogs. Notably, we are now aware that this look can occur as an actual encounter with the animal, or as a simulated encounter via a visual image. 

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In the context of both the Anthropocene and the Digital Age – where technology has developed to such an extent that our lives and our environment are embedded in automation and information – it is well known that the realm of the visual has also transformed into the digital (Mirzoeff 2015:18). Visual culture theorist, Nicholas Mirzoeff (2015:18) explains that “[t]he change at hand is not simply one of quantity but of kind. All the ‘images’, whether moving or still, that appear in the new archives are variants of digital information. Technically they are not images at all, but rendered results of computation”. Accordingly, any image (moving or still) or artwork mediated, shared or looked at on a digital platform is a different entity or medium in its own right: 

"In many cases what we can ‘see’ in the image, we could never see with our own eyes. What we see in the [digital] photograph is a computation, itself created by ‘tiling’ different images that were further processed to generate colour and contrast. It is a way to see the world enabled by machines." (Mirzoeff 2015:18, emphasis added).

 

Parallel to the evolution of the visual image into the digital era, the specific image of the dog seems to also be computed into its own digital version. The human pursuit of looking at, visualising and taking photos of dogs (and animals in general) is amplified on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, which allow us to share (and archive) digital images of our dogs or our human-dog companionship instantaneously. To rephrase Mirzoeff’s above explanation of the digital nature of visual culture in terms of companion species: the popular digital image of the dog is a way to see the human-dog relation enabled by machines. This means, images of dogs on social media are an example of a Harawayian contact zone where humans, dogs and technology meet. Notably, in this contact zone the image of the human-dog relation once again reflects the changes in our understanding of our companion species: just as in the case of the popularity of the camera and photography coinciding with the intensifying companionship between human and dog; so too the extension of the image of the dog into the digital realm coincides with the current estimation (by theorists such as Haraway 2008) that the human-dog relation is entwined with technological developments.

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To view archives of the dog in visual culture visit: Google Arts & Culture as well as a short summary by Sara Barnes (2017).

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A particular way of understanding the experience of being (and accordingly also relations to others) is philosopher Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological notion of “Being” in his seminal text Being and Time (1962[1927]). For Heidegger, human beings have a unique distinctiveness that sets them apart from other nonhuman entities. Part of their distinctiveness lies in the ability to be interested in their own entity of being – we are able to engage with what it means to be human and consider the essence of being. Heidegger conceptualises the notion being as Dasein. For Heidegger (1962[1927]), Dasein refers to both the human being, as well as the kind of being or existence that humans have. In other words, through the analysis of Dasein, Heidegger attempts to make sense of human existence or the experience of being human. He argues that the only possible way to grasp the human condition is to examine how humans interpret themselves in everyday life (Philipse 1999:440). Thus, he explains the world and its phenomenon from the primary experience of the human being. 

 

Central to Dasein is the notion of a joint existence. Heidegger (1962[1927]:155) argues that the individual is never alone and has to share the world, as well as the experience of being-in-the-world, with others. This shared existence is referred to as Mitsein or “Being-with-Others” (Heidegger 1962[1927]:155). Mitsein dismisses an individual consciousness existing without the material world, since “we cannot understand who we are and what we do in daily life except in terms of our relations to others” (Philipse 1999:448). Thus, in order to understand the nature of being, we need to consider the nature of our being-with-others who are also in the world − how we relate to others and other things. Being-with implies that human beings stand in constant relation to others and we come to define ourselves through these relations so that “the existence of the Other is part of my understanding of everything in the world” (Russow 1980:132). Through the conceptulisation of Mitsein, Heidegger argues for a co-constitution of the world. 

 

Notably, Heidegger does not explicitly state who and what he exactly considers to be the other, he only explains: “By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me – those others against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself – those among whom one is too” (Heidegger 1962[1927]). The notion of being-with-others therefore makes it clear that we share the world with other entities, who are capable of perceiving the world themselves (Russow 1980:135), yet it is not clear whether or not these are human or nonhuman others. Owing to (1) Heidegger’s primary concern in Being and Time with the forms of being specifically relating to being human; and (2) his later teachings of the animal as poor in the world as well as significantly different from human beings (1929-30); Heidegger’s Mitsein should arguably be read in terms of being-with other humans. However, recently theorists (Buchanan [2007], James [2009], Bailey [2012] and Andersson [2017]) have suggested that the notion of Mitsein should be expanded to consider being-with other humans and nonhumans – reformulating Heideggerian thought from a human-animal studies point of view. Furthermore, the relation between humans and animals has often been described in terms of Heidegger’s being-with, arguing that humans share the world with animal subjects that have a being of their own (Bailey 2012). Accordingly, I argue that, in Heideggerian terms, humans exist as Mitsein with animals, in the sense that humans come to define and share their world with reference to animal others. From a Heideggerian human-animal perspective, the human-dog relation can be interpreted as humans being-with dogs or humans being-with companion species. 

 

In terms of multispecies relations, seminal cultural theorist Donna Haraway employs the notion of becoming with to explain the entwined relation between humans and nonhumans (including animals). For Haraway (2008:4) humans are always in the process of becoming and we become beings in coalition with nonhuman others, who entwine with of our being. Therefore to “be one is always to become with many” (Haraway 2008:4). Jordan (2011:266) suggests that it is helpful to understand and use this notion of becoming with to better unpack Haraway’s multiplex notions of interspecies relations. Becoming with is “a practice of becoming worldly, of making a world with and out of the elements in and around being” (Jordan 2011:266). Haraway (2008) uses the idea of becoming with others to describe the interactions between all living entities, not just humans, in all times and places, to create a space to live and exist in. For Haraway (2008), nonhumans and humans are becoming with one another: an “infolding” towards one another to make up the knot of being in the world (Jordan 2011:266). Thus, humans and nonhumans are entangled in complex relations that are constantly in the process of becoming with one another. These species do not just exist alongside one another, but are constantly developing and functioning with and possibly, towards one another. 

 

Haraway adapts her becoming with from Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret’s reconfiguration of animal encounters. Despret (2004) articulates a new condition of understanding and studying subjects through the process of becoming with. She suggests that in the process of researching animal subjects, animals become with humans and humans become with animals – instead of the commonly suggested ‘humans becoming animals’ or ‘animals becoming human’ (anthropomorphism). Despret (2004:131) refers to this as “a new articulation of ‘with-ness’”. As a result, for nonhumanists or multispecies studies (following Haraway’s theory), the human-dog relation can be seen as human and dog becoming with one another and existing as entwined entities, which forms the basis of companion species theory.  

 

Jordan (2011:255) positions Haraway’s becoming with in direct opposition to Martin Heidegger’s idea of being-with (Mitsein). He argues that Heidegger’s being-with implies difference between subjects and the possibility of detachment, while becoming with connotes boundless connection and engagement amongst entities (Jordan 2011:255). Similarly, Mudde (2018:67) maintains that a key difference between Heidegger’s being-with and Haraway’s becoming with is the manner in which becoming with de-centers the human “but it does not remove, or perhaps forget, its particularity so much as it troubles the boundaries of the human as ontological category”. Although I acknowledge such readings of Haraway and Heidegger’s concepts as oppositional to one another, I contend that by placing Heidegger and Haraway in contrast to one another, Mudde and Jordan point to an important conversation between Heidegger’s theory of being and Haraway’s multispecies studies, which is often omitted or ignored. 

 

It is surprising to find that Haraway (2003; 2008) herself does not explicitly refer to Heidegger in her discussions on companion species. Additionally, Heidegger’s relationship to nonhumanist or multispecies theory has been largely omitted. Haraway (2008:221) briefly mentions the Heideggerian idea of “the open” to “ask a fundamental ontological question, one that puts human and dog together … Here we are, and so what are we to become?”  However, she (perhaps intentionally) does not make the connection between becoming with and Mitsein. In fact, in a footnote Haraway (2008:334) thinks of Heidegger as “no help at all”, because she argues that Heidegger’s formulation of Dasein is too far removed from feminist thought. Despite rejecting Heidegger, I find that one cannot read Haraway’s companion species from an objective scholarly perspective without at least being reminded of Heideggerian philosophy. Simply looking at the syntax of being-with and becoming with, points to an evident starting point of a relation between the two concepts. Thus, I argue that it would be erroneous to read Haraway without consulting Heidegger, or at least keeping the Heideggerian idea of being-with-others in mind. Throughout this study, I start to fill this gap by showing the relation between Heidegger and Haraway’s thought, as well as rethinking Haraway’s companion species with Heidegger. By engaging with Heidegger’s philosophy of being and related critique of anthropocentrism, I show that Heidegger’s writing not only influences nonhumanism, but also has much to contribute to anthropocentrism, nonhumanism and environmentalism.

 

Additionally, the notion of humans being-with dogs as well as the process of humans and dogs becoming with one another can aid in interpreting and unpacking the relation between humans and their dogs on social media. Consequently, I apply both the notion of being-with in relation to becoming with in my exploration of the human-dog relation on social media. These notions are not necessarily posed in opposition to one another, but rather serve as a well-rooted point of theoretical reference to grapple with companion species online. 

For the purpose of understanding what it is exactly that dogstagrams do, or, said differently, what meaning they convey, I explore the digital terrain of these images and their associated networks by embarking on a digital humanities project. More specifically, I employ a variety of digital humanities methodologies accumulated in a digital humanities project to analyse dogstagrams and Dogs of Instagram. As I outline in the introduction to this study, digital humanities is a mode of scholarship that derives from the digital shift in society and occurs as the intersection between digital technology and humanities disciplines (Drucker 2014:9; Burdick et al. 2012:121). Doing digital humanities ranges from using technology to do research, to “the cultural study of digital technologies, their creative possibilities, and their social impact” (Schreibman et al. 2016:17). My digital humanities project, entitled Insta-dog,  utilises the full spectrum of digital humanities, using computation to analyse and visualise dogstagrams, as well as study dogstagrams as digital entities, their possibilities and influence on the meaning of the human-dog relation. In doing so, I immerse myself as scholar in the digital representations and extensions of the conversation surrounding companion species online.  

 

My reasons for using digital methodologies to study dogstagrams are twofold. Firstly, digital library theorist Bethany Nowviskie (2015:i12) argues that digital humanities can be a helpful approach in addressing the complexities of the Anthropocene. Although the line between using technology to benefit the environment and to destroy the environment is blurry, for Nowviskie (2015:i12), digital humanities should attend to environmental relations to attempt to answer Mirzoeff’s (2014) call for “‘counter-visuality’ to the dominant imagery of the Anthropocene”.  Thus, in response to Nowviskie’s argument and in the framework of the Anthropocene as well as the human-nonhuman relation, my digital humanities project visualises the human-dog relation in a new manner, beyond the current representations in the discourse of visual culture.  

 

Reflecting on the digital humanities in relation to environmental relations between the human and nonhuman, I am tempted to rethink the digital humanities in relation to the theoretical concepts introduced by Heidegger and Haraway, which have aided my discussions of the human-nonhuman relation, against the background of the Anthropocene. Even though the digital humanities is an insured interdisciplinary field in current academic environments, it is surrounded by contested debates, as theorists struggle to reach a consensus over what precisely constitutes the digital humanities. Owing to its interdisciplinary nature, the field has been defined, re-defined, unpacked, re-packed, shaped and reshaped several times in various contexts.  I suggest that perhaps both Haraway and Heidegger can be helpful in formulating an understanding of the digital humanities.

 

In Heidegger’s text The Question Concerning Technology (1962) he reflects on how technology (technē) has developed to such an extent that it is no longer an instrument or means to an end for human use, but rather a way of being-in-the-world that reveals and unfolds existence and experience. Heidegger (1977[1962]:7-8) contends that technology enframes (Gestell) the world, human existence and all beings in a state of standing reserve (Bestand). In this way, technology is integrated into human existence, just as humans are integrated into technology. I suggest that Heidegger’s notion of Gestell can be used to explain the digital humanities: digital humanities is an enframing of our knowledge and pursuit of knowledge with reference to what it means to be human with technology. Since Heidegger’s (1977[1962]:6) technology “is a mode of revealing”, then enframing research technologically accordingly also reveals new insights and truths, resulting in so-called ‘digitally born’ insights. In this manner, my digital humanities project Insta-dog enframes the always-already digital dogstagram as well as the canon of exploration regarding the human-dog relation, in order to reveal new insights and meanings regarding these networked entities. 

 

In turn Haraway’s (2008:4) introduces the concept of “contact zones” as spaces where species encounter, entangle and multiply. For Haraway (2008:217), contact zones are meeting points, outside of our comfort zones, where entities meet with historicity, respond to each other and develop new responsible relations. Following Haraway’s notion of contact zones, we can think of digital humanities as a contact zone, where humanities scholarship meets digital technologies. Like Haraway’s contact zones, digital humanities represents a new manner of doing research, somewhat out of the comfort zone of the typical humanities scholar. Yet, akin to Haraway’s contact zones, when the scholar, humanities discourse and technology meet in the zone of digital humanities a response occurs, resulting in new networks and (hopefully responsible) insights. Equally, just as the entities that meet in Haraway’s contact zones have a historicity, each aspect that meets in a digital humanities project carries with it a background, context and discourse. In the contact zone of digital humanities these contexts cannot be forgotten as they meet, exchange and add to their existing findings. 

 

That is to say, we can think of Insta-dog as a contact zone, where the following aspects meet: (1) myself as researcher with the historicity of my research and arguments regarding the human-dog relation, as well as my own history with my dogs, Fudge and Cody; (2) the dogstagram bearing with it the canon of the visual history of dogs in art and the human-dog relation, as well as the nature of the digital realm of social media platform Instagram; and (3) manual and automated computing methods that have their own distinct way of interpreting digital properties. From these “transdisciplinary encounters” (Travis 2015:928) new understandings and meanings are derived, exchanged, entangled and multiplied.  

 

My second reason for enframing the dogstagram in the contact zone of the digital humanities, stems from my understanding of the nature of images on social media. As explained above, images online, more specifically on Instagram, are more than just visual representations. They are what Caple (2019:429) calls “a modal ensemble” or, according to Tifentale (2015:2) a “networked camera” that is “a curious hybrid, image-making, image-sharing, and image-viewing device”. Furthermore, as explained, dogstagrams as a social media post contains a variety of elements, ranging from metadata to captions and altered images belonging to a wide network of information. It is therefore appropriate to investigate such a digital entity using digital methods that account for the dogstagram in its entirety, in comparison to, for instance only a visual or content analysis that only examines the image. That is to say, a digital computation matches the digital nature of the computed image. Tifentale (2014:3) explains: “New image-making and image-sharing technologies demand also radically new ways of looking at these images. Big data require ‘big optics,’ borrowing Paul Virilio’s term from the early 1990s”.  

 

New media theorist Lev Manovich (2001; 2011; 2014),  provides helpful guidelines and documentation on how to conduct such a digital humanities project that incorporates a ‘big optics’ approach. Crucially, Manovich (2011:9) maintains that any computer-assisted examinations of massive cultural data sets require a “distant reading” of computed patters as well as a “close reading” by a human, to make sense of these patterns. Manovich (2011:9) emphasises that “completely automatic analysis of social and cultural data will not produce meaningful results today because computers’ ability to understand the content texts, images, video and other media is still limited”. For Manovich (2011:9-10), the ideal digital humanities project combines “human ability to understand and interpret … and computers’ ability to analyse massive data sets using algorithms we create”. Hence, Manovich’s ideal application of digital computing methods requires a multi-scale or mixed-methods approach that incorporates a variety of technologies and, importantly, a human hermeneutical interpretation. I utilize such a multimodal approach to create the digital humanities project, Insta-dog.

Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto is never-ending and always evolving as the human-dog relation is always in progress (Haraway 2003:3). Accordingly, I contribute to and further this significant, ongoing discussion, by also exploring the specific, continuing human-dog relation with technology. Furthering Haraway’s above-mentioned notion of companion species, I introduce another layer to this intricate relation: the technology of social media. Since technology is embedded within most aspects of being, it is also increasingly involved in mediating, representing and playing a role within human-dog companionship. More specifically, the technology of social media images depicting human-dog relations add another coat to the companionship of humans and their dogs, as well as to the meaning of companion species within contemporary society, which Haraway has opened up by blurring the boundaries between humans, animals and technology. Van Dooren et al. (2016:10) explain that species relations extend beyond personal encounters into the online realm of viral videos, YouTube and social media, which share a constant stream of virtual companion species encounters.  Inevitably, “emergent work in the field of multispecies studies is responding to these twenty-first century media with projects that deploy critter cams or orbit around Facebook fan pages and Meetup groups” (Van Dooren et al. 2016:10). My critical reading then also responds to technological platforms by particularly venturing into the world of social media images labeled as dogstagrams. A brief account of these images follows.

 

On social media, specifically Instagram - a popular platform that focuses on the capturing and sharing of images and videos (Hu, Manikonda & Kambhampati 2014:595) – people tend to share content of a large variety. Hu, Manikonda and Kambhampati (2014:596) identify eight prominent categories of images shared by users: friends, food, gadgets, captions, pets, activities, selfies and fashion. As a result, photos of pets are a prominent feature of content shared on social media platforms and in virtual communities. A large amount of these pet images contains dogs. In fact, one out of every five pictures shared by dog owners includes their dog, while 11% of dog owners have created an account dedicated to or for their dog (Irishdogs 2017). In general, dog owners share an image or refer to their dogs on social media six times per week (Spector 2017). 

 

With such a large amount of dog pictures generating and circulating online, specific hashtags on Instagram (#dogstagram and #dogsofinstagram) are used to identify these images. Therefore, when a user shares an image of a dog on the platform, they usually add these hashtags (amongst others) to identify their image as a photo of a dog. The amount of these images shared to date has grown to such an extent that a virtual (imagined) community has formed know as Dogs of Instagram and these images are commonly called dogstagrams. In other words, in the same way that the selfie is a worldwide phenomenon, so too is the dogstagram. A dogstagram can therefore be defined as a digital photograph, typically taken by a camera phone, with a dog as its key subject matter, which is then shared to a social media platform, such as Instagram (Figure 2). 

 

The dogstagram has become so influential in contemporary society that a new social media platform BarkFeed has been established, dedicated solely to dog pictures (Risman 2015). In addition, several dogs on Instagram are used as so-called ‘animal influencers’ to promote various pet-related products, forming part of a growing section of the advertising sector (Ungerleider 2016) and a billion-dollar industry (Igneri 2016:67). Developers of BarkFeed argue, in a typical anthropocentric manner, that dogstagrams and photos with dog subject matter make people happy and make them feel better. Additionally, as seen in the tail of the Stonehouse photograph, these photos seem to form communities and connections across borders and species, which in turn relates to the notion of multispecies. Sonnekus (2017) explains that the dog community on Instagram forms supportive ties. Thus, these images play an important role in society (Risman 2015) as well as in the visualisation of being-with and becoming with companion species in the Digital Age.