Climate irresponsibility on social media. A critical approach to “high-carbon visibility discourse”

ABSTRACT

Human GHG emissions are entering networked everyday relations. On social media, users potentially “reveal” their carbon footprints when they post pictures of a beef-based dinner or intercontinental travel. As the increasing urgency of climate change coincides with people's increasingly online-oriented lifestyles, we suggest that social-media research should devote attention to the ways in which users overlook, hide, limit, or casually articulate their high-carbon oriented lifestyles in digital space. This would contribute important knowledge about the role of social-media communication concerning climate change as an individual responsibility, and requires a concentration on how status updates become loaded with ideological meaning (high-carbon visibility discourse). The purpose is to present a framework for critical analyses of visual disclosure of carbon footprints in social media use. Media theory, semiotics, network theory and critical theory are combined to theorize how users’ activities on social media become high-carbon oriented; their promotion of a business-as-usual stance; and how this operates ideologically through reification, legitimation and unification.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• visual social media
• climate change visibility
• climate shame
• irresponsibility
• critique of ideology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/klimat/penny-parnevik-det-ar-ackligt-med-engangsplast/ (retrieved November 13, 2019)

2 Even though climate change is becoming increasingly visible in media culture (Anderson 2014), it is still not a dominant issue. When it comes to digital media, it is a marginal phenomenon in social media compared to other topics. On Instagram, one finds only 4.5 million status updates on #climatechange, which is only a drop in the digital ocean compared to, for example, 146 million updates about #holiday (retrieved October 22, 2020). But, the growth of knowledge about climate change, as well as exploding political engagement with the issue in many parts of the world, makes it difficult for an increasing number of individuals to ignore or entirely stand outside it in contexts of digital media use.

3 Here, one can note the newly adopted Swedish word “smygflyga,” which means “to fly in secret” (Wolrath Söderberg and Wormbs 2019).

4 Obviously, the role of ingroups for the production of high carbon visibility discourse could also be studied intersectionally (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Council Formas (2016-00570).

Notes on contributors

Peter Berglez

Peter Berglez’s research focuses on the relation between media and globalization and environmental/sustainable communication. Berglez has published his research in journals such as Journalism Studies, Environmental Communication and Media, Culture & Society.

Ulrika Olausson

Ulrika Olausson’s research deals with journalism/media and global environmental risks, and climate change in particular. Her research has been published in renowned international journals such as Public Understanding of Science, Environmental Communication, European Journal of Communication and Journalism Studies. Ulrika is also on the editorial boards of the journals Environmental Communication, and Frontiers in Communication: Science and Environmental Communication.