Tweeting the Environment #Brexit

Description

The level of politicisation of the environment has been low in the UK. Economic concerns outweigh environmental ones in political debates, public policies and political agendas. Can the rise of social media communication change this situation? Tweeting the Environment #Brexit argues that, although limited by the dynamics of the British context, the technological affordances of Twitter enabled social actors such as the Green Party, ENGOs, and their associates to advance their political and green claims in order to mobilise voters before the 2016 EU referendum and to express their concerns in order to change environmental politics in the aftermath. The interdisciplinary research employed a combination of big data applications such as ElasticSearch and Kibana and desktop applications such as Gephi and SPSS in analysing large-scale social data. Adopting an inductive and data-driven approach, this book shows the importance of mixed methods and the necessity of narrowing down "big" to "small" data in large-scale social media research. Front Cover Tweeting the Environment #Brexit Copyright Page Dedication Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures List of Tables 1 Introduction Part 1 2 The Environment and Politics 2.1. The Global Rise of Environmental Awareness, Movements and Politics 2.2. Environmental Awareness and the Politicisation of the Environment in the UK 2.3. What Does the Environment Mean for the UK’s EU Membership? 3 Twitter, the Media Ecology and Environmental Communication 3.1. Twitter Communication Studies – The Current State of Play 3.2. Studies of Environmental Communication on Twitter Part 2 4 Environmental Discourses on Twitter 4.1. Dichotomised Claims in the Pre-Referendum Discourses: Remain for Green Versus Leave for Green 4.2. Dominant Claims of Remain for Green on the Referendum day 4.3. A Radical Shift in the Environmental Discourses after the Referendum Day 4.4. Weak Trends of the Discussions on Six Environmental Topics 4.5. Conclusion 5 Elite Domination in the Asymmetrical Twitter Space 5.1. Asymmetric Structure of Twitter Communication 5.2. Decentralisation and Anarchy on Twitter 5.3. Attention-Driven Prominence of Elites 6 Sparse ‘Communities’ and Their Green Bridges in Twitter Networks 6.1. Previous Studies – SNA of Social Media 6.2. The Formation of Sparse ‘Communities’ 6.2.1. Sparse ‘Communities’ 6.2.2. Loosely Connected or Isolated ‘Communities’ 6.2.3. Lack of Interactions and One-way Information Flow 6.3. The Prominence of two Major Green Camps 6.4. Isolated State of News Media and Journalists 6.5. Exclusion of Established Political Parties and Isolation of Non-Green Politicians 6.6. Conclusion 7 Influential Social Actors: Competing for Discourses on Twitter 7.1. Political Parties and Politicians 7.2. The ENGOs Camp 7.3. News Media and Journalists 7.4. Seven Other Categories of Influential Social Actors 7.5. Conclusion Part 3 8 Twitter and Environmental Politics 8.1. The Influence of Social Context 8.2. The Role of the ‘Technological Affordances’ of Twitter 8.3. Old and New Players on Twitter 8.4. Conclusion: The Intertwining of Social Media Communication and Offline Reality 9 Social Media Research: Towards an Inductive Approach 9.1. The Methodological Challenges 9.2. The Inductive Approach in Action – Let the Data Tell us the Story 9.2.1. Research Process 9.2.2. The Use of Mixed-Methods and Computational Applications to Explore the Data 9.2.3. The Role of the Literature 9.3. The Advantages and Limitations of our Inductive Approach Bibliography Index