Discourses of life, machines, and control: How science organisations represent the Earth to the public on Instagram
Date
2024-04-17
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Abstract
Scientific efforts have prompted significant changes in how the average person understands, and thus interacts with, the Earth. To ensure optimum Earth-human interactions, academic and policy leaders must have a clear accounting of exactly what scientific representatives are telling the public about the Earth. Yet, what little research exists tends to prioritise specific topics–climate change in particular–and media environments–like newspapers–at the expense of representations of the whole Earth or representations via new media environments like social media. Using a Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this study produced an inventory of the ways science organisations represent the Earth to the public through their official Instagram accounts. It found that the Earth is represented through, not just written language, but visual imagery, in a wide variety of ways, like ‘Earth is the water planet’, ‘Earth is beautiful’, and ‘humans are harming the Earth’. Nearly all the representations identified, however, contribute in some way to two dominant messages. That 1) the Earth is the blue water planet upon which life flourishes because of Earth’s many mechanistic life-support systems. Thus, 2) we must use science to wisely control earth to promote and protect, especially human, life. The list of identified discourses was then compared with what the National Science Foundation outlined in 2010 as the ‘9 big ideas about the Earth all citizens should know’. The study found that the current ideas science organisations advance align with the aspirational ‘9 big ideas’ in a few ways, especially in centring life as Earth’s most important and consequential attribute. However, they differ in many more, most notably in their evaluation of Earth’s dynamism. Though science organisations may intend to present Earth’s continually changing states–like Earthquakes and extinctions–as natural, they actually represent it as primarily negative and thus regrettable. Further contributing to the imperative for humans to use science to stabilise, and thus control the Earth.
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Keywords
Earth science, Science communication, Multimodality, Multimodal Discourse Analysis
Citation
Droboth, J. C. (2024). Discourses of life, machines, and control: how science organisations represent the Earth to the public on Instagram (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.