Lived, Local and Everyday: Understanding Media Use in Green Home Renovation

Abstract

While a wealth of research has identified how the media can amplify or attenuate public perceptions of environmental risk, crisis and sustainability, there remains much to learn about how the media are experienced in environmental communication, notably in their lived, local and everyday cultural context. This chapter uses an Australian case study of home renovations, sustainability and energy efficiency in order to investigate intersections of the local and the digital by focusing on everyday media. Here instances of media use are “grounded” within testimony of quotidian, lived experience, derived through focus groups with renovators based in Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne as well as a national online survey with active home renovators. The cultural research reveals that local places and digital spaces are interconnected—and both are resources used to navigate the abundance and fragmentation of available information. Regardless of the medium, lived experience is generated and valued as a useful resource to guide people through the renovation process; indeed “local knowledge” forms a social construct infused with values and assumptions. We argue that examining the situated integration of media in everyday life can afford deeper insights into the realities of both media use and public perceptions of environmental concerns, not to mention people’s capacity to act.