The popularity of Alaska’s Bear Cam is a testament to technology’s influence on people’s connections with nature. Archived version of an article published with The Atlantic in 2016.

It is 9:09 p.m. in Alaska, the temperature is 61 degrees, and a slender, brown bear stands below a small waterfall. All around the bear, salmon attempt to jump up the falls. Suddenly, the bear lunges into the water and emerges with one of the fish in his mouth. Seagulls hover over the scene, hoping to scavenge leftovers. I’m watching this nature drama from the other side of the planet, live on my computer in northern Sweden. I’m not the only one. Every summer during spawning season, millions of people watch bears gorge on salmon at Brooks Falls, a waterfall 290 miles southwest of Anchorage, in Katmai National Park and Preserve. It’s seasonality in the digital age: News sites around the world happily announce that the so-called Bear Cam is up and running again, and people flock to their screens. There are obvious reasons that the feed is popular. Bears are attractive and exotic; when they spring into action on camera, it’s thrilling. But those moments are few and far between. For many hours of the day, there aren’t even bears in sight. Yet many people still spend the whole season tuning in. Last year, more than 22 million people visited Brooks Falls remotely through the feed. So what draws so many people to the Bear Cam? How close can a computer really get to nature? Viewers have indeed formed a kind of community with each other, park rangers, and … the bears themselves. There is nothing new with people watching bears for entertainment. Bear-baiting was a popular spectacle in Shakespeare’s London, for instance. Much more recently, in the 1960s, seats were installed around the rubbish dumps in Yellowstone National Park for watching scavenging grizzlies, who had regularly gathered in the area to feed on garbage since the 1880s. For contemporary bear watchers, Brooks Falls is a hotspot. Nature photographers and tourists have visited the site for its bears for decades, using the…

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