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.