Discourses of life, machines, and control: How science organisations represent the Earth to the public on Instagram

Droboth, Jason Curtis

Discourses of life, machines, and control: How science organisations represent the Earth to the public on Instagram

dc.contributor.advisor	Dolphin, Glenn
dc.contributor.advisor	Eaton, David
dc.contributor.author	Droboth, Jason Curtis
dc.contributor.committeemember	Dolphin, Glenn
dc.contributor.committeemember	Eaton, David
dc.contributor.committeemember	Dutchak, Alex
dc.contributor.committeemember	Blue, Gwendolyn
dc.date	2024-05
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-18T18:03:03Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-18T18:03:03Z
dc.date.issued	2024-04-17
dc.description.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.
dc.identifier.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.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1880/118430
dc.identifier.uri	https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/43272
dc.language.iso	en
dc.publisher.faculty	Science
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subject	Earth science
dc.subject	Science communication
dc.subject	Multimodality
dc.subject	Multimodal Discourse Analysis
dc.subject.classification	Mass Communications
dc.title	Discourses of life, machines, and control: How science organisations represent the Earth to the public on Instagram
dc.type	master thesis
thesis.degree.discipline	Geoscience
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary
thesis.degree.name	Master of Science (MSc)
ucalgary.thesis.accesssetbystudent	I do not require a thesis withhold – my thesis will have open access and can be viewed and downloaded publicly as soon as possible.