In his book, Environmental Communications and the Public
Sphere, Robert Cox does a pretty good job at explaining the adapting role
and benefits of social media for gathering information about environmental
issues in the twenty-first century. It is important to know about the relevancy
of social media because whether it is individual advocacy or a more organized
advocacy campaign, “in drawing attention to, criticizing, or mobilizing around
a specific environmental problem, activist today rarely rely on one social
media tool” (Cox, 192).
Because of social media, the means of environmental
communication and advocacy have broadened and become more accessible. Social media and social networks have allowed
for a more lubricated means of spreading environmental information from news
and journalistic site and creating buzz around trending issues. Because of the easy of creating, uploading,
and disseminating information online, there is much more citizen reporting and
documenting, which means more ethical accountability for public and private
institutions.
Moreover, social networking has allowed for the forming of
online communities and targeted special interest groups. These groups may stay online, but they might
also mobilize in person and take their advocacy to the streets; “today,
environmental, climate, and social justice activists are using the full suite
of social media in their organizing efforts” (Cox, 189).
I found it interesting when Cox discusses the ironic
challenge of “efficient” media, that is “social media is clearly an efficient
tool for targeting key groups by my be constrained by this very advantage” (Cox,
198). What happens when communicating to
a small committed group of people is that, only the people that care, care to
search, learn, mobilize, or act. “The
challenge of social media, therefore, is that it may require a wider strategic
repertoire of media, enabling activists to communicate beyond the choir when
necessary” (Cox, 198).
I think that differentiation, a
steady flow of new content, and promotion of utility is necessary for a social media effort to attain the
interests of the masses. In a culture
influenced by a capitalistic ideology, a source’s reinvention and/or innovation
are perceived as desirable, or at least interesting, traits to consumers, think
about how many of your “socially-conscious” friends bought the iPhone 4gs
because it had a slight, hardly noticeably, difference to the identical looking
4g. The marketing techniques used for
the iPhone, can be translated to the services of a blog, or any online
site. It has to appear different from
other competitors in the market a balance of both aesthetics and function; it
has to keep providing updated material, that is to stay relevant and keep
people interested; and it needs to be marketed to a perceptive lifestyle, that
is it "may" improve one's lifestyle.
Or if you want your blog to be successful, for a lot of
people to read it, "take it seriously", and be spread around via social
networking, all you have to do is work within the Google search ranking system,
that is the more hits you get, the more hits you will get. Generally only the top ten search results,
the first page after entering in your search, is all that people pay attention
too. If you don’t feel like doing the
footwork of shameless wallplugs on your friends’ facebook pages, twitter
blasts, and spamming forums and youtube comments, then you can always just pay
for key-word search rankings with Google Adwords. With Adwords, you can pay a fee so that
when people search for “benefits of guano as fertilizer” your site will
seem legit with it when it pops up number one.
Interesting that your conclusion is that it's form, rather than content, that makes something important in social media. Since Cox (and you, implicitly) talk about how social media requires/promotes a specific type of relation for "how we conceive of ourselves and the world around us," and that this is in fact the definition of environmental communication, do you think social media's form of relating ourselves to the world can do something unique for environmental communication it can't do for other forms?
ReplyDeleteUnique?...idk, probably not, not more than anything else. I think the medium can be used for any topic of thought, conversation, concern, for anybody who is motivated enough to participate in the process that social media invites. There is a lot of random content on the internet that gets shared, and only a fraction of it relates to environmental issues, all sorts of things are shared relating to sports, politics, food, cats, memes, viral videos, music videos, music, etc...and it seems that what is shared is set by trends, momentary cultural focuses, and usually set by a mainstream source that carries some sort of authority or ethos. In fact, while communicating about environmental issues through social media has benefits like connects people to people to events and information; it may also disconnect people from the non-digital world around them as it may lead to available distraction from reality; caring passivity, or limited perspective and misdirect activism(depending on the horizon of information sources).
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