Longing for a greener life. Shaping and reproduction of environmental information in social media

TY - JOUR

T1 - Longing for a greener life. Shaping and reproduction of environmental information in social media

AU - Haider, Jutta

N1 - This paper attempts an investigation of how environmental protection and destruction are framed in social media accounts of environmentally relevant everyday life practices, especially with a view to the types of futures that are brought in, envisioned, implied or bracketed. To trace this it draws on a case study with material from a group of interconnected, active Swedish environ- mental, family-life blogs and from other social media applications mashed- up in these blogs. In staging their everyday and domestic lives people repro- duce, shape and re-invent discursive and practice repertoires. It is striking to see how seemingly trivial practices connected with environmental awa- reness, recycling, choosing certain products, cycling, avoiding flying, saving energy, avoiding plastic or vegetarian cooking are woven into varying kinds of larger narratives of longing, change, fear, hope, engagement or withdrawal and how this is shaped by the affordances of social media. Uniting interests in the informational value of material practices and in the “small” politics of the web, drawing on Bakardjieva's notion of subactivism, this presentation adds to examinations of how continuous discursive alignments of certain practices with environmental protection and destruction shape the produc- tion and circulation of certain types of information on the environment and environmental ethics.

PY - 2011

Y1 - 2011

M3 - Published meeting abstract

SN - 1653-1507

VL - 6

SP - 117

EP - 117

JO - ACSIS Publications

JF - ACSIS Publications

T2 - ACSIS Conference: Current Issues in European Cultural Studies, 2011

Y2 - 15 June 2011 through 17 June 2011

ER -