- Creation
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Creator (Definite): Guro Flinterud
- Current Holder(s)
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Full title:
Flinterud, G. 'Polar Bear Knut and His Blog', in Thorsen, L.E., Rader, K.A. and Dodd, A. (eds.), Animals on Display: the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History (Pennsylvania University Press, 2013), pp. 192-213.
Description:
Flinterud offers an in-depth examination of a blog that took the famous Berlin polar bear 'Knut' as its subject. She relates the way in which the original intention of this blog - to present the bear in an innocent, somewhat whimsical, entertaining light via stories purporting to have been written by the bear himself - could not be sustained in the face of online disputes between readers. As Flinterud comments, 'Originally planned as a place free of opinion, the many heated discussions that ensued reveal that the "story of Knut" carried connotations far exceeding the one-dimensional representation of a cute cub around which the blog was built.' (193)
Of particular note, Flinterud suggests, were the interventions of a contributor who took the name of an animal rights activist, 'Frank Albrecht.' Albrecht and others' critical interventions, Flinterud notes, interrupted an already-established pattern of gentle, enthusiastic commentary, causing a number of longer-term contributors to take offence. The resulting discussions, she argues, were demonstrative of ways in which 'The blog format opened up a new arena of conversations about animals, where ordinary people from all over the world were able to meet and exchange opinions... The blog presented fans with like-minded people that they would never have encountered elsewhere, and it provided them with a space to let down their guard and cultivate the silly, playful side of their interest in animals.' (210)
'Although the blog was established as a fiction, intended for childish amusements and diversion, the adult fans slowly took over the power of definition and turned the blog into a community of awareness, constantly negotiating the meaning of "Knut" through friendly exchanges, quarrels with annoying "intruders," and disagreements among themselves.' (211)
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CitesKaren Rader, 'Interacting with The Watchful Grasshopper; or, Why Live Animals Matter in Twentieth-Century Science Museums', in Thorsen et. al., Animals on Display (2013), pp. 176-191.
Description:Knut 'had an emblematic identity that was filled with content according to shifting opinions. Knut's blog displays how these opinions existed simultaneously withing the same culture, much as did reactions to The Watchful Grasshopper (see Rader, chapter 8).' (210)
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CitesLiv Emma Thorsen, 'A Dog of Myth and Matter: Barry the Saint Bernard in Bern', in Thorsen et. al., Animals on Display (2013), pp. 128-149.
Description:'In a sense he [Knut] could be compared to Barry the Saint Bernard (see Thorsen, chapter 6), in that both animals had an emblematic identity that was filled with content according to shifting opinions.' (210)
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Cited byA. Dodd et. al., 'Introduction', in L.E. Thorsen, et. al. (eds), Animals on Display: the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History. 2013. pp. 1-11.
Description:'Guro Flinterud documents how an older form of animal-human relations, that beween a zookeeper and his or her animal charges, has been transformed by new media - specifically, the Internet. The polar bear Knut, born in 2006 at the Berlin Zoo and abandoned by his mother, was intially presented to the world as a seemingly endless stream of images: the cute cub, being hand-reared by a human (male) caregiver. Within this context, Flinterud examines how Knut was transformed in cyberspace through the narratives of blogging. Interactions between Knut (now represented as a blogger himself) and his online fan community (who constructed themselves around this mythical animal representation) made explicit the contradictory cultural values and opinions connected to the polar bear in the early twenty-first century. Such attention, ultimately, was not enough to save Knut - he died at the age of four, collapsing into a pool of water in his enclosure, surrounded by zoo visitors, and within forty-eight hours, amateur video of his death appeared online. That this particular animal mattered - to many humans - seemed never to be in question. But Flinterud's analysis... encourages us to tend better to how animal representations both shape and connect us to the living, breathing, thinking animals behind such representations - that is, to the very matter of the animal itself.' (10)
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QuotesKnut's Blog
Description:'In March 2007, a little over three months after Knut's birth, the local broadcasting company Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) started a blog that was supposedly written by Knut himself... Originally planned as a place of free opinion, the many heated discussions that ensued reveal that the "story of Knut" carried with it connotations far exceeding the one-dimensional representation of a cute cub around which the blog was built.' (193)
'Knut's career as a blogger started in March 6, 2007, when the director of the RBB online department, Torsten Rupprich, envisioned creating a blog in which Knut would "write about" his own life. He described it as a Schnapsidee, as something of a whim - though a whim that would spawn a blog that at its most popular was one of the most visited sites in Germany. The blog ran for almost two years, and was suspended in January 2009. (193-194)
[NB: the footnote to the above quote reads: 'The blog was shut down due to the passage of a new German law rendering it impossible for state-run broadcasting companies to include entertainment content on their web pages that did not relate to their TV or radio programs. The blog was available online as an archive for fans until September 1, 2010, when a new law was passed forcing the RBB to remove the blog from the Internet altogether.' (211)
'RBB's sponsorship agreement with the Berlin Zoo gave them exclusive media access behind the scenes at the zoo in the months before Knut's first public media appearance on March 23, 2007. Being a local company, RBB's TV programs were available only to viewers in the Berlin-Brandenburg area. In order to reach a broader audience, they made a site for Knut on their web page where videos of the cub were available as podcasts. The blog grew from this initial site, and was initially written by Torsten Rupprich. Swamped by the amount of work invoved, Rupprich soon handed over the responsibility ot another journalist at the online department, before eventually realizing that it would be best to hire someone from outside to do the job. In September 2007, writer Dorotea Horedt was hired, and she continued until the blog was stopped in January 2009. For a short period in late summer 2007, two of the regular visitors to the blog also had writing privileges, though they wrote mainly as themselves and not as Knut.
The blog quickly became immensely popular in Germany. During the first week that Knut appeared in front of the public at the zoo (the last week of March 2007), the blog was attracting almost fifty thousand hits daily. The comment count was also growing steadily, with around one hundred comments to every entry. By early MAy, the average was between two hundred and three hundred comments to each entry, with occassional entries receiving as many as seven hundred or eight hundred... From the end of MArch onward, there was also an increase in the number of comments from people outside of Germany. Soon there were as many comments in English as in German, and a demand for translations arose... By May 2007, translations appeared in Spanish, English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Korean, Chinese, Greek, and Finnish, all made by the fans.' (194)
'"Knut's" blog posts were a combination of text and photos or videos. The texts often commented on the scenes shown in the videos and photos, providing a translation from animal behaviour to human experience.Thus the way the blog posts were composed... created a sense of increasing proximity of the human to the animal.'(195)
'The way Knut was represented in the blog could clearly be described as anthropomorphic. The stories in the blog ere not merely about Knut; they were first-person accounts "written by" Knut, and the fans elected to address himdirectly. As such, Knut was both a representative of the species Ursus maritimus and an individual with his own personality and life history. When commenting on the content of the blog entries, the fans addressed their comments or questions to Knut, while addressing the actual writers as "administrators."... conversations amongst the fans in the commentary section were just as important'. (195)
'Written by "Knut" [ie. editors of the Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) website] in the first person, the posts were narrowly focused on the polar bear cub and his developing maturity. "Knut" never mde any value judgements or expressed political concerns; he never commented on issues of global warming or the status of polar bears in the wild; and he never explicitly stated views about zoological gardens. This was a conscious choice made by the administrators; the blog was originally created to resemble a kind of children's story. However, those who commented and kept returning were adults who were there not only because they thought the polar bear cub was cute and found the posts funny. For many, the initial fascination was connected to their engagement with environmental issues and animal welfare.' (201-202)
'By addressing Knut as one would a child, through simple language and words like "cute," "cuddle," and "little one" and giving him nicknames like Knuti and Knutti, the fans' language use [on the blog] provoked people from outside the fan community, who posted comments on the blog criticizing the fans for being seduced by Knut's cuteness.' (203)
''Links about environmental issues... were never marked as off-topic - an apparent paradox, since they do not explicitly concern Knut and his life at the zoo... discussions of environmtal issues do not threaten the positive foundation on which the community was created... Issues concerneing zoos themselves, on the other hand, open up possibilities of questioning Knut's welfare in the Berlin Zoo, and thus threaten to break down the fans' common ground [and were as such subject to heavy censure]. the blog, then, was built on a paradox: it was dependent on a uniform representation of the animal, yet was constantly revealing such a position as difficult to acheive and nearly impossible to uphold.' (208)
'fans struggled to uphold a self-organized community created around the mythic construction of a constantly happy "cute Knut."' (209)
'Knut's blog was constructed by the RBB within the long tradition of creating zoo pets, highlighting the individual zoo animal; through the open format of blog technology, however, the audience were able to take over the power of definition and bring their cultural references into a narrative that had earlier been controlled by zoo administrators and editors of newspapers. Thus Knut's blog is not new in the sense that it constructs a zoo animal as a personality; rather, the technology of blogs represents something new as it invites the audience to partake in the construction.' (209-210)
'The blog presented the fans with like-minded people that they would never have encountered elsewhere, and it provided them with a space to let down their guard and cultivate the silly, playful sides of their interest in animals.' (210)
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Related toKnut (polar bear)
Description:Flinterud notes that 'Early in December 2006, at the Berlin Zoo... A retired circus bear, Tosca... gave birth to two cubs...
Of the two cubs, one died after only a few days, but the surviving cub would become the most famous polar bear in Germany, if not the whole world: Polar Bear Knut... Knut's level of fame was unanticipated even by the zoo management, and should be seen as the result of a set of fortunate coincidences.' (192)
'A major force behind Knut's initial fame was undoubtedly his cuteness... As a cub, Knut had a big head, fluffy white fur, large black eyes, and a flat, round face, appearing as a model for the term "neotony."' (202-203)
'Because of the increasing focus on conservation issues in zoos over the last decades, Knut as a polar bear was immediately interpreted in a larger context of global warming and species extinction specific to his time. Tet as an individual he was part of a long tradition of zoo celebrities and zoo pets that goes back to the emergence of the modern zoo in the nineteenth century. however, whereas the famous zoo animals of the nineteenth century were often species considered exotic because they had never been seen in Europe before, Knut represented a species that was constructed as special because of the danger that it would disappear.' (209)
