Getting under the skin of climate change on social media
Welcome to “Making Climate Social”, an ESRC-funded Future Research Leaders project I lead at University of Sheffield that seeks to get under the skin of the social media revolution and what it means for climate change communication. This blog will provide updates on the research as well as guest posts from researchers and practitioners in the field, as well some perspectives from beyond the climate communication community. In this first post, I will outline the motivation for the research, the approach we will be taking, and what we will be doing in the months ahead.
Why study climate change communication?
Climate change communication has been growing as a research topic in recent years. Searching Google Scholar for ‘climate AND change AND communication’ in article or book titles returns 796 results, and it’s reasonable to assume that the true size of the literature is even greater.
So why has climate change communication generated so much interest? Three reasons are immediately apparent. First, science communication was already a well-established academic topic by the time climate change came on to the global agenda in 1988. As the world became more aware of climate change, so the communication of climate science became an object of research itself. Second, climate change is “distant…dispersed…difficult to get your head around”. So communication of climate change became of special interest; often focusing on effective strategies for raising awareness of a somewhat abstract phenomenon. Third, climate change is not only a scientific topic, but also a high-stakes political issue, where communication is often linked to its ability to mobilise action, behaviour change and political pressure.
How will we study social media data? Context is crucial.
Alongside these core issues, Mike Schäfer also highlights the rich new environment provided by social media for climate communication research with “a wealth of data that is, sometimes literally, only one click away”. However, the ease with which this data can be hoovered up through the APIs provided by Twitter, Facebook etc also brings risks. Relying on a narrow range of data sources can constrict the questions that researchers can address. Social media data from APIs *has* prompted some insightful literature regarding the contributors to communication, the content of communication and the connection between users. However, it has also suffered from the same inattention to context identified more broadly across ‘big data’-driven research. Making Climate Social seeks to address this gap, by identifying the crucial contexts for social media usage amongst climate change communicators, and using these to bring greater depth to the analysis of data extracted from social media platforms. In short, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of human (and, perhaps, non-human) climate change communication on social media.
What’s coming up on Making Climate Social?
Over the coming weeks we will dig into this in more detail on the blog, sharing insights from a recent Discovery Day where academics and practitioners identified a range of key questions of interest that could be addressed in the research project. For example, how can we understand social media usage across different platforms? What opportunities and limitations for communication that are built in to the social media platforms themselves? How do climate change experts negotiate a social media landscape that is said to substitute quality of information for quantity? Are there explanations for polarisation in climate change communication that go beyond questions of cultural values and political affiliation? Are new methodological approaches to social media required to address these questions? We will also use the blog to provide updates on the development of our public data visualisation project, and analyse contemporary issues linked to the research project.
Do you like the sound of the research project, or do you think it is missing the point? Do you have any questions that you think this research could address? We have not jumped on the ‘closing comments’ bandwagon, so please feel free to respond below or get in touch via email.
