Abstract
The present study aims at evaluating how YouTube users understand, negotiate and appropriate science-related knowledge on YouTube. It is informed by the qualitative analysis of post-video discussions around visual scenarios of sea-level rise (SLR) triggered by climate change. On the one hand, the SLR maps have an exemplary status as contemporary visualizations of climate change risks, beyond traditional image categories such as scientific or popular imagery. YouTube, on the other hand, is a convenient media environment to investigate the situated appropriation of such visual knowledge, considering its increasing relevance as a navigational platform to provide, search, consume and debate science-related information. The paper draws on media practice theory and operationalizes digital methods and qualitative coding informed by Grounded Theory. It characterizes a number of communicative practices of articulated knowledge appropriation regarding climate knowledge. This includes “locating impacts,” “demanding representation,” “envisioning further,” “debating future action,” “relativizing the information,” “challenging the reality of anthropogenic climate change,” “embedding popular narratives,” “attributing to politics,” and “insulting others.” The article then discusses broader questions posed by the comments and related to the appropriation and discursive negotiation of knowledge within online video-sharing platforms. Ambiguity is identified as a major feature within the practice of science-related information retrieval and knowledge appropriation on YouTube. This consideration then serves as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between information credibility and knowledge appropriation in the age of the digital. Findings suggest that ambiguity of information can have a positive impact on problem definition, future imagination and the discursive negotiation of climate change.
Highlights
“Images are made and used in all sorts of ways by different people for different reasons, and these makings and uses are crucial to the meanings an image carries”
Uldam and Askanius. (2013) have analyzed YouTube user debates around COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen and evaluated the potential of the platform to provide a communicative space for citizens’ engagement in climate politics. They highlight the potential of YouTube to act as a platform enabling the mobilization of activists for the climate cause, and show that political debates about climate change on YouTube are often characterized by a hostile ambience and tend to impede a true dialogue
The following tools and applications have been operationalized for data extraction and analysis within the present study: YouTube Data Tools (YTDT)2 are a toolbox for extracting data from the YouTube platform via the YouTube API3 version 3, and some scraping functionalities built on top of it
Summary
“Images are made and used in all sorts of ways by different people for different reasons, and these makings and uses are crucial to the meanings an image carries”. The public was flooded with motives of polar bears, vulnerable landscapes, individuals affected, technological solutions and empowered communities Movies such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth have tried to combine the benefits of different image types by featuring both techno-scientific projections of possible futures, local snapshots of past experiences and offers for an engaging present. Another visual strategy with the similar objective–to inform, affect and engage at the same time–was to make computer-driven visualizations more concrete, tangible and germane to relevant publics (Sheppard et al, 2011; Sheppard 2012; Gurevitch 2014). For Tereick, the debates represent “pseudo-dialogues” enabling users to react to mass media contributions, without the conventional mass media participating in the debate (Tereick 2013, 249 f)
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