Disseytation - Social Media, Climate Change + Mobilisation: January 2021

Research Methods and Practice - Research Question Lab

My main area of interest is…

how social media influences behaviour change/political mobilisation re climate change
> perhaps visualisation, infographics, the role of opinion leaders/influencers and our relationship to them (para-social relationships)
> focusing on social media as a function in itself rather than a distributor of traditional media

- group mentality > sharing events and likes and how this influences others (more in the realm of facebook I want to focus on instagram as its the most familiar network to me)
- what lens of geography are you looking at it through

JAMBOARD

Issey - how social media influences behaviour change/political mobilisation in the face of climate change.

I want to understand how activist influencers para-social relationships with the audience shape the audiences behaviour (if they do at all or if its just an echo-chamber)

Using the lens of the internet at a 'third space' an emphasising the social relationships online and framing SM as more than a distributor of traditional media

Third Space > Ray Oldenburg and refers to places where people spend time between home (‘first’ place) and work (‘second’ place). They are locations where we exchange ideas, have a good time, and build relationships.

In the age of Covid it has become clear that internet could be classed as a "third space" > interesting when we consider governance of this space? What are the power relations?

SO WHAT - THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE RESEARCH

If these opinion leaders are effective in creating behaviour change is this because of what they are communicating or because their followers were likely to make changes anyway?
If they are effective how does it effect democracy having such potent political influence in the hands of a small group of non-elected people?
What can we learn from the effectiveness of the parasocial element of behavioural change when designing future campaigns and climate change communications?

MOVING FORWARD

- How am I going to determine this behaviour change? > the only way I think I could do it would be through questionnaires and the audience's self assessment
- Would also like to interview the influencer activists and see if the whole parasocial element is intended or how they view their work.
- Need to learn more about the social element of behaviour change > perhaps email stefi from the decision making module to se if she has any recommendations on this.
- Ask Ariell when it is appropriate to contact potential supervisors
- Try to see if there are any good books about designing masters thesis.

Parasocial Relationships

Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other's existence.

Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars.

Wikipedia

Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television.^[1]^[2] Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusionary experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show host, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.^[3]

A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona,^[4] becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification.^[3] Positive information learned about the media persona results in increased attraction, and the relationship progresses.^[4] Parasocial relationships are enhanced due to trust and self-disclosure provided by the media persona.^[3] Media users are loyal and feel directly connected to the persona, much as they are connected to their close friends, by observing and interpreting their appearance, gestures, voice, conversation, and conduct.^[4] Media personas have a significant amount of influence over media users, positive or negative, informing the way that they perceive certain topics or even their purchasing habits.

Social media introduces additional opportunities for parasocial relationships to intensify because it provides more opportunities for intimate, reciprocal, and frequent interactions between the user and persona.^[3]

Keywords of Interest + Social Element of Social Media

We were looking at how to formulate a research question this week and we looked at writing keywords of things we were interested in. I made this mind map:

The role of para-social relationships on social media n influencing environmental behaviour change.
> questionnaire to followers
> Intention of influencers > through interview
> Techniques employed by influencers

Social media and its effect on Individual Behaviour Change around Climate Change (potential elective essay intro)

When we talk about the relationship between social media and climate change, we tend to focus on Social Media as being an extension of the traditional media sphere. Extensive research has been done on framing of information online or the deployment of emotions in transmitting this information, but this is still a rather blinkered approach to considering the effect of social media on the public’s understanding and behaviours against climate change.

It is one that fails to see social media as a new realm in and of itself as well as acting an as extension to traditional media outlets. Through the lens of behaviour change models for sustainability most commonly deployed by behavioural economics, previous research has considered the education model; the idea that education will lead to awareness and attitude change and then behavioural change but has overlooked the social models of social media. Social models are ways that others’ behaviour is both common and responsible and can effectively alter behaviour. On platforms where daily behaviour is recorded and shared among friends, we need to consider the impact this peer-to-peer sharing and monitoring has on people’s awareness and behaviours regarding climate change.

I think that we are approaching an interesting turn in the way that social media is conceptualised and analysed in academia as we see generation Z begin to conduct research of their own. One could argue that all research before this point has been akin to anthropological ethnographic study as an older generation analyses the younger generation’s usage of social media, almost a different culture. The rise in gen Z research will bring more autoethnographies/another interesting perspective from the first generation of digital natives. Through the work of this generation whose social lives are so enmeshed with digital technologies it will be evident the role that the social element of social media has on behavioural change.

We talk often of the changing media landscape as a result of social media looking at its impacts on traditional new media and news outlets but we overlook how media is changed itself and how peer created media > post shares etc. now has a larger precedence in our lives as a result of social media and therefore inc importance of SOCIAL  ELEMENT > for too long we have focused on  the high to low consumptive rather than peer to peer expressive social media.

These platforms are designed to exacerbate the social elements of the brain, its why they thrive > its not purely on convenience > they are mining the human psyche > importance to realise the potential of this to trigger behavioural change in the field of sustainability (probably already being done through advertising online > this is why influencer marketing works)

Have seen through Cambridge analytica the power of SM to change politics, and voting behaviour  it is a powerful vehicle that if  utilised has great potential for shaping public behaviour rapidly > needed for the 10 year change.

CASE STUDIES
            - Social media and inc in veganism from an environmental perspective
            - XR strategy of using social ties/sociability

- Transition from political impact to change on individual behaviour.

FURTHER READING
A Grounded Theory Analysis of the Techniques Used by Social Media Influencers and Their potential for Influencing the Public Regarding Environmental Awareness
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3351108.3351145

A shift away from policy making

Changes in Politics are hard to quantify especially when you try to link to causal projects and I think in reflection the scope of a project that looked at the causal relationship between social media and political change in the policy making realm would be too large a scope to cover in a masters thesis.

However I am still interested in the role of social media and how it influences change in the environmental sphere so I might instead focus on the personal level of change, of how social media influences personal behaviour change.