Journal of Environmental Media - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2022

In our times of increasing screen dependency, the data infrastructures making possible ‘online’ or ‘virtual’ modalities of work and leisure have been increasingly contested. From the Netherlands to Ireland and Chile, activists have challenged the environmental consequences of energy- and water-intensive data centres, as well as the often undemocratic ways of deciding on their construction. In this piece, I draw on insights from the field of social movement studies to outline four key problems that can help us understand better the bottom-up infrastructural politics of screen media: (1) How can we explain the differential politicization of data infrastructures in various national contexts? (2) How do movements frame their resistance to data infrastructures? (3) How do we define success in the contestation of data infrastructures? (4) To what extent have we observed the transnationalization of data infrastructures contestation? These problems open up potential new directions for research that draws on comparisons and is attentive to diffusion processes across contexts.

Theories of agenda-setting, punctuated equilibrium and framing undergird theories of the policy process. These theories presume that public attention to extreme weather events would result in an increased likelihood of policy action. However, another possibility suggests that the increasing frequency, expanded range and extended duration of climate disasters could result in the normalization of extreme weather events. Despite increasing news coverage of heatwaves, supercell tornados, record wildfires and 1000-year weather events, existing points of intractability have hardened to dull pathways for policy change. By integrating more recent media studies concepts associated with citizen journalism, image events and upward activation into theories of the policy process, this theoretical review identifies new areas of interdisciplinary collaboration and examines how mobile media, social media and shortform video (MSV) can be used to perform climate services and encourage policy action in the wake of ongoing and recurring extreme weather events.

In recent years, social media data have been used in the analysis of nature within the concept of cultural ecosystem services (CES). From the viewpoint of CES, social media posts that contain content about nature are read as virtual human–environment interactions and conclusions are drawn on how humans perceive, interact with and value the natural environment. We argue that these analyses often lack a deeper understanding of the inherent mechanisms of social media and the sociocultural dimension of the users who produce this data. In this light, we evaluated social media posts that show images of species and landscapes in the bid to gain an understanding of the cultural processing of nature-based posts in digital social networks. We conducted the study using the popular social media platform Instagram. By analysing 124 profiles and conducting five semi-structured interviews, we examined how Instagram posts that focus on nature (in terms of species and natural landscapes) are portrayed online and how these posts are utilized as a cultural entity for self-presentation purposes. Based on this empirical data, we provide a critical perspective on the use of ‘nature posts’ on Instagram for analysing CES. Our results show that nature-focused Instagram posts are a cultural media performance forming contexts of meaning with which human subjects interact. Furthermore, these posts underlie a perceived affordance where the user’s social media practices are essentially tied back to mechanisms of recognition and have to be understood as self-promotions. Images on Instagram that show species and natural landscapes are being used here as an image resource for the purpose of expressing social distinction. Therefore, we particularly argue for a stronger collaboration between the natural, social and cultural sciences to overcome the difference in terms of understanding, analysing and promoting values of nature and CES.

A growing group of nature enthusiasts share observations of flora and fauna through participatory online platforms. These ‘citizen science’ data are valuable for research and policy, but the value of these platforms goes beyond this: they provide opportunities to stimulate experiences with nature and remember nature that has been lost. Waarneming.nl is the largest nature observation platform in the Netherlands, with over 70,000 users contributing data on biodiversity through their website and mobile applications. Using Waarneming.nl as an example, the theoretical exploration in this article offers a new lens to look at platforms for nature observations. Users of Waarneming.nl read and write digital traces of encounters with other species, creating a ‘hybrid experience’ of nature, where digital and physical information are intertwined. As physical experiences become scarcer in threatening times of species endangerment and extinction, Waarneming.nl should additionally be understood as a place to memorialize lost nature. By conceptualizing Waarneming.nl as a digital lieu de mémoire (‘place of memories’) and a place where hybrid experiences of nature are inspired, this article reflects on the positive and negative consequences of such platforms for humans and their multispecies relationships.

Review of: A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism, Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza (2022)

New York: Oxford University Press, 320 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-19005-535-6, p/bk, $27.95