<
https://theconversation.com/people-do-care-about-extinct-species-but-not-for-long-new-study-242979>
"Lonesome George was discovered motionless in his enclosure, one morning in
June 2012. Overnight, George had taken not only his final breath but the final
breath of his entire species, the Pinta Island tortoise, as it faded into
extinction.
Obituaries for George soon followed in the
New York Times, the
Economist
and a host of other outlets as befits an extinction celebrity.
However, as we enter what may be the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history,
there isn’t always an equivalent outpouring of grief when a species slips away.
For example, how many column inches were afforded to the bean snail after its
extinction in 2016?
One way to test if we humans collectively care about extinctions is to peer
into our online behaviour and measure what we say and do. Enter culturomics. In
a world where we produce mountains of online data every day, the field of
culturomics takes a big data approach to measuring the zeitgeist of cultural
change, from predicting the death of certain words to tracking collective mood
shifts after economic crashes.
To understand if we really care about the bean snail and other recently extinct
species our research team tracked how people referred to species on X (formerly
known as Twitter) before and after the announcement of their extinction. The
results are now published. It seems we do care, but only briefly."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
