Unravelling the Threads: Discourses of Sustainability and Consumption in an Online Forum

Abstract

Word Count:8,9632 Unravelling the threads: discourses of sustainability and consumption in an online forum This paper analyzes an online discussion that followed an article published by UK environmental activist and journalist George Monbiot (2007) in The Guardian online newspaper. The analysis addresses the ways in which participants in an online forum debate responded to the tensions and contradictions between lifestyle, consumption and sustainability highlighted in the original article. The discursive construction of class, green political orientations and identities, visions of "the good life", and appeals to religion and science, are highlighted throughout the analysis -as are the discursive strategies for positioning self, other and audience in the debate. The argument emphasizes the heterogeneity of discursive positioning, and reflects on the role of social media in the politics of consumption and sustainability, especially given the inherent reflexivity of web forums as online communicative forms.

Climate Hypocrisies: A Comparative Study of News Discourse

“…John Urry notes that "hypocrisy is a major issue in questions of climate change mitigation leadership" (2011, p. 156). Other scholars have similarly noted various aspects of what we call 'climate hypocrisy', including: the risk of hypocrisy in celebrity advocacy (Anderson 2011;Boykoff 2008;Cooper et. al.…”

Negotiating Virtue and Vice: Articulations of Lay Conceptions of Health and Sustainability in Social Media Conversations around Natural Beverages

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“…The method is an adaptation of the participant-observation techniques of ethnography to the online context (Kozinets, 2010). While a large part of netnographic fieldwork involves gathering and coding online data, it is differentiated from the typical qualitative analyses of online content in communication research (e.g., Cooper, Green, Burningham, Evans, & Jackson, 2012; see also Langer & Beckman, 2005) by its ethnographic element of personal participation and immersion in an attempt to experience embedded cultural understanding (Kozinets, 2010). The value of netnography for communication researchers lies in its specific, proven procedural guidelines and the analytical framework it provides for studying the culture of online communities.…”

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“…While many scholars have, in passing, noted the rhetorical force of hypocrisy in discourse about climate change, there has been no systematic empirical study or robust theorization of the nature of hypocrisy discourse. Scholars have noted the hypocrisy intrinsic to much celebrity advocacy (Boykoff and Goodman, 2009;Anderson, 2011;Cooper et al, 2012); the utility of hypocrisy for attacks on the credibility of climate scientists and environmental activists (Gavin and Marshall, 2011;Knight and Greenberg, 2011;Mayer, 2012;Gunster and Saurette, 2014;Marshall, 2014); the existence of accusations of hypocrisy directed toward state actors and climate policy (Platt and Retallack, 2009;Webb, 2012;Eckersley, 2013;McGregor, 2015); the impact of hypocrisy accusations in shifting climate discourse into a moral register (Young, 2011;Dannenberg et al, 2012); representations of the general public as hypocritical (Höppner, 2010); and the hypocrisy of "green" consumerism (Barr, 2011;Laidley, 2013). Such references to climate hypocrisy, however, are largely cursory and under-developed, noting the idea's rhetorical significance without any sustained investigation.…”