Meme-ing while the world burns

Climate change news on Reddit and the cultural politics of platform participation

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12599178
AutoresBenjamin Litherland (0000-0003-3735-354X, Manchester Metropolitan University, autor de correspondencia), R Wood (0000-0002-0053-2969, Keele University)
Año2025
Volumen29
Número1
Páginas251-268
Fecha de publicación2025-07-29
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEuropean Journal of Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1367-5494 • E-ISSN: 1460-3551
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/13675494251356427
OpenAlexW6941104503
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas54

This article makes a case for the value and urgency of a cultural study’s contextual approach to researching how climate change news events are interpreted by audiences. Research that applies a classically cultural studies ‘bottom-up’ approach to studying climate media audiences in the spaces and contexts where they encounter and negotiate meaning is surprisingly sparse in the scholarship on climate news reception. The article draws on a case study: a qualitative thematic analysis of Reddit discussion threads in which users responded to images and videos of New York City obscured by smoke from Canadian wildfires in June 2023. Analysis of the threads demonstrates how Reddit users drew upon popular culture references to films, television, video games and other media to articulate the strange and shocking nature of the images; expressed a range of ambivalent affective states from detachment to despair, anger and fear, but not hope, and shared knowledge and advice in the humorous, geeky, authentic and authoritative discursive and affective registers valued on the platform. Taking a contextual approach to researching climate media audiences reveals how the social and cultural context in which climate news stories or images are encountered plays a fundamental role in shaping understanding and feeling, and how this comes to underpin the kinds of climate politics and futures that are imagined as possible or impossible

Ambivalence · Context (archaeology · Meaning (existential · Negotiation · News media · Politics · Scholarship · Social media · Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies · Mycorrhizal Fungi and Plant Interactions · Plant Pathogens and Fungal Diseases