Digital storytelling going viral: using narrative empathy to promote environmental action

ABSTRACT

This article considers digital storytelling as an emerging media practice for public education and action about environmental justice. Digital storytelling presents examples of how media texts can go viral and have a substantial impact on public discourse, while also providing multimodal communication to study and experience for social action. Using frameworks of both narrative empathy and the rhetoric of empathy, while drawing on a viral Greenpeace media text produced in 2014 by the Don’t Panic agency entitled LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome, this article considers how the empathetic effects of digital storytelling mobilises environmental action across multimodal networks of digital media.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital storytelling
• environmental justice
• empathy education
• media texts and multimodality
• energy literacy
• narrative empathy

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Greenpeace and Don’t Panic for providing permissions to use images from LEGO: Everything is Not Awesome. The author also acknowledges his colleague Dr Danine Farquharson for introducing him to this LEGO case study when collaborating on an invited panel at the Centre for Carbon Innovation at the University of Edinburgh.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Derek Gladwin is an Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy Education and a Sustainability Fellow with the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. He has previously been an invited research fellow at University of Amsterdam, University of Edinburgh, and Trinity College Dublin. Gladwin’s research focuses on environmental literacy, storytelling, and digital media culture. His recent books include Ecological Exile (2018), Gastro-Modernism (2019), and Rewriting Our Stories (2021).

Notes

1 It is important to acknowledge the tension between ‘digital’ and ‘sustainable’: we only have access to ubiquitous tools of digital media because of historical unsustainably ‘cheap’ forms of fossil fuel energy. Although this analysis is necessary, it currently diverts from the focus of this article.

2 The author of this article has previously drawn on the LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome digital media artifact in Gladwin (2018) as a way to think through future work in the environmental humanities.