LIBA402 Final Project: Becoming-Animal : April 4 Main Menu Sight and Animals: Ways of Seeing and Looking Hashtags as Digital Currency Becoming-Animal: Braidotti and Spinoza's Vitalist-Materialist Worldview Russian Bimbocore, Post-Soviet Aesthetics and Social Media Russia's Fur Trade and Modern Implications

Instagram Deep Dive - Serval Circulation

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These pages just dive into just servals, namely why the page is called Serval Circulation. There are just images of servals either just being shown off, not really trying to facilitate sales (only one posted near the end of this page). Going deeper in these pages I could only find images of these servals acting in tandem with the other domesticated animals, having very normal encounters. There was nothing that stood out to be alarming - and it felt very documentary-like at times. Yes, there was a sense that the owner wanted to show-off their animal, they also could use the hashtag to ease their audiences expectations (the serval seems to be doing fine and looks 'happy'). Obviously we do not know what is going in the minds of the serval, but Instagram can be a tool to highlight the more positive relationships that exist between serval and owner. The hashtag also can act as a way to resist a negative image as it can be traced back to when the owner first started posting (the owner is held accountable in this way too). Keeping servals as pets is still problematic, but in terms of hopefully understanding their well-being, hashtags can be used in this way. Key words such as life story stick out to me, and I quote from the first page (a disclaimer given in both Russian and English in one of the posts):

"Friends. Many people ask us where we have savannahs. Our enclosure was free and we wanted to help some wildcats that needed a home. In memory of Leya. A lot of cats wrote to me- both servals and caracals, and even a dog. We decided to give the house to Kira and Banksy. They are siblings. These cats are not for breeding, not for business or anything else. They came to become members of our big family" (serval.leya, 2022). 

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  1. Hashtags as Digital Currency Sofia Svichtcheva

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