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12 - Media and the Environmental Movement in a Digital Age

from Part III - Culture and Environmental Sociology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

By
John Hannigan
Edited by
Katharine Legun ,
Julie C. Keller ,
Michael Carolan  and
Michael M. Bell
Katharine Legun
Affiliation:
Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands
Julie C. Keller
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island
Michael Carolan
Affiliation:
Colorado State University
Michael M. Bell
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

In a seminal article from the early 1990s, Gamson and Wolfsfeld (1993) characterize the relationship between mass media and social movements as one of "asymmetrical dependency," whereby the former rely on the latter for three purposes: to mobilize their constituencies; to validate their existence as politically important collective actors; and to enlarge the scope of conflict, drawing in third parties. In this chapter, I review scholarly research on the media and the environmental movement over the last half century. As helpful as this has been, it focuses almost entirely on traditional media, ignoring the tumultuous changes that have occurred in political communication associated with the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and other new media platforms and technologies. Analysis of several case studies of new media and environmental campaigns suggests that the most effective movement strategy is to embrace a "hybrid media" system which blends older media logics, notably those associated with broadcast television, with new digital media logics.

Keywords

environmental communicationhybrid media systemsenvironmental movement–media interaction
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology , pp. 193 - 205
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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