Media Students, Climate Change, and YouTube Celebrities: Readings ofDear Future Generations: SorryVideo Clip

Abstract

A conventional textual approach from an ecocritical point-of-view focuses on narratives and semiotics to arrive at tentative conclusions about its potential effects on spectators, drawing on a rich tradition where literature and film have been privileged as sources of knowledge. If such media remain central toward understanding the culture we are immersed in, the exponential diversification of new media narratives available for new generational and connected audiences requires a diversified approach that includes consideration of online video and other forms of media summarized in a 2019 overview article by Michelle Seelig. On the one hand, more online textual analytical tools are needed to explore environmental themes, while those used primarily across literature and film might have to be reformulated toward capturing and understanding the growth of new media texts which are being consumed by contemporary audiences (Rust et al.; Weik von Mossner). On the other hand, with the growth of narrowcasting and media convergence, different types of audience measurements and more specific enquiries can be used to gauge how public responses can help identify meaningful textual investigation (Metag and Schafer). As environmental and media scholar Sean Cubitt asserts, a good start has been made in linking environmental textual analysis and audience research through journals like Martin Barker’s online Participations journal (www.participations.org), alongside more recently Interactions: Studies in Communications and Culture, which had a special issue on this specific area, edited by Pietari Kääpä. Several of the papers in this issue (2014) helped lay the ground rules for a “more systematic approach to studying both hypothetical and actual audience responses to environmental communications” (Cubitt).