Environmental crises in digital culture: investigating networked silences crises

Abstracts

Anticipating crises: the knowledge infrastructures of environmental apps

by Carin Graminius, Lund Universitet

The prevalence of apps has inspired the term app culture, a world where our daily lives are mediated by digital appliances (Ajana 2018). Utility apps are one type of apps designed to meet a variety of needs, and following deteriorating environmental conditions, air pollution apps and water-level apps have become everyday utility devices for citizens in various parts of the world.

Designed by companies or government agencies and building on scientific knowledge, these devices are intersections of political, scientific and commercial interests and knowledge. Thereby the environmental apps create ubiquitous knowledge infrastructures users experience in their daily lives; they provide a space where scientific, commercial and political knowledge is consumed, produced, anticipated and put in action. Indeed, they play a role in forming users understanding of the environmental crisis. But what kind of knowledges and understandings of environmental issues do they convey? And what do they conceal?

In my presentation, I seek to understand two types of utility apps in a Sinophone context: Singapore and China. Following rising sea levels water is increasingly treated as a threat in Singapore, and commercial and governmental apps which monitor water levels are prevalent. Likewise, despite efforts to curb air pollution, poor air quality is a common problem in China and air-quality apps constitute popular everyday devices where citizens share anticipated pollution levels. In my presentation, I ask what kind environmental discourses that come to dominate these apps, and what kind of ignorances they produce.  

How to not know about the climate crisis? Ignorance logics and search engines

by Jutta Haider, Swedish School of Library & Information Science, University of Borås and Malte Rödl, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

In this contribution, we explore how Google Search co-configures the relationships between the new logics of knowledge and ignorance in relation to the climate crisis. We draw on ideas from agnotology (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008) and the sociology of ignorance (e.g. McGoey, 2014) to explore how variously constituted ignorances concerning the climate crisis emerge at the intersection of Google Search, everyday life and civil society/politics. We analyse this through four examples where different configurations lead to socially produced ignorances: (1) information avoidance; (2) search term selection; (3) algorithmic preferences; (4) media manipulation. We highlight that these ignorances are not only related to the underlying algorithmic and commercial logics of search, but also co-produced by content creators, users, and other human and non-human actors. We argue for considering not only consider knowledge logics but also ignorance logics when discussing the social and societal implications of algorithmic systems. The presentation reflects on what a move towards search via AI-based conversational user interfaces might mean for networked silences in relation to the climate crisis. The contribution builds on and complements previous research by the authors, e.g. Haider & Rödl (2023).

References:
Haider, J., & Rödl, M. (2023). Google Search and the creation of ignorance: The case of the climate crisis. Big Data & Society, 10(1), 20539517231158996.
McGoey, L. (2014). An introduction to the sociology of ignorance: Essays on the limits of knowing. Routledge.
Proctor, R., & Schiebinger, L. L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press.) 

Topics of denial: Climate contestation in shifting media ecosystems

by Kjell Vowles, Chalmers University of Technology

It is well known that a concerted effort to spread doubt about the science of climate change was intensified in the US in the early 1990s, following the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC (Dunlap and Brulle 2020). In Sweden, there has generally been widespread acceptance that climate change is a real and serious issue, but lately, contestation about the science has become widespread on far-right alternative digital media (Vowles and Hultman 2021). However, little is known about climate obstructionist discourses on Twitter in Sweden, or about how reporting of the IPCC in legacy media has changed over time.

In this paper, I do a longitudinal analysis of discourses regarding the IPCC on Twitter and in legacy media in Sweden. I have collected all articles concerning the IPCC from the four biggest Swedish daily newspapers going back to 1988 (in total 2000+ articles), and all tweets going back to 2009 (in total 26 000+ tweets). I will use automated topic modelling to find latent themes about the IPCC and to assess how they has changed over time, and to compare discourses on Twitter with reporting in legacy media. This paper is part of a bigger international research project, where we will compare discourses around the IPCC in Sweden with IPCC discourses in the United States.

References:
Dunlap, Riley, and Robert Brulle. 2020. “Sources and Amplifiers of Climate Change Denial.” Pp. 49–61 in Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Vowles, Kjell, and Martin Hultman. 2021. “Scare-Quoting Climate: The Rapid Rise of Climate Denial in the Swedish Far-Right Media Ecosystem.” Nordic Journal of Media Studies 3(1):79–95. doi: 10.2478/njms-2021-0005.) 

Directing Humanitarian Action: How to challenge technological inequalities?

by Zoé Waterlot, University of Glasgow

This discussion is part of the PhD project ‘Placing Humanitarian Digital Technologies’. Information is key for planning fair and adequate humanitarian action to provide aid for climate victims and refugees (e.g., Madianou, 2019b; Wouters et al., 2021). Drones and other new technologies allow humanitarian organizations to evaluate the damages and the needs for help (e.g., Madianou et al., 2016; Bryant, 2022). This evaluation is only made possible thanks to a considerable effort from the refugees themselves to adapt to Western-centered technologies, tools, and language. Indeed, social medias have become central in this planning process. Sharing information with international organizations on digital platforms requires endangered people to share personal data about their situation (e.g., Madianou, 2019a; Balogun et al., 2020). Thus, the digitalization of help changed the approach to humanitarian help to a model where refugees need to jump through more hoops to access aid. With this change of paradigm, refugees set the pace of the emergency help they receive by sharing personal data on digital platforms accessible to humanitarians. In this discussion I evaluate that the lack of access to digital tools and skills for the most vulnerable creates a gap in access to appropriate humanitarian help amongst victims of climate refugees. Furthermore, the sparsity of safe platforms to share their personal and sensitive data strengthens this gap by demotivating vulnerable people to expose themselves to the lack of data protection on public platforms (e.g., Gilman and Baker, 2014; Madianou et al., 2016; Rejali and Heiniger, 2020). Henceforth, in discussion I evaluate the extent to which this digital silence is filled by preconceived notions from international organizations about what vulnerable people need based digital humanitarianism.) 

 Organizers

• Rödl, Malte; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences 
• Haider, Jutta; Swedish School of Library & Information Science, University of Borås 
• Wormbs, Nina; KTH Royal Institute of Technology