Week 7 Reflection

This week’s readings covered a range of very important information related to climate communication, which was especially interesting to me as I am finishing up my last semester as a Communication major, so it was cool to read some of these articles with that background behind me. The articles broke down the cost of electricity in its relation to household salaries, while other articles for the week addressed the messaging strategies of environmental campaigns and the communication types used by organizations as well as the prominence of movement hashtags and their role in our social climate today.

For this week, I also listened to episode 12 of the think 100% podcast, which is called, “Our Oceans x The Earth’s Lawyers. In the episode, the show’s hosts talk about the importance of the ocean. Alongside the hosts, the episode features an ocean expert, an earth enthusiast and a lawyer. The title of this particular episode caught my attention because my roommate/best friend and I have talked a lot lately about plastic pollution and ocean pollution from plastic waste. She has also brought me to love sharks and I have since taken great interest in shark conservation and promoting an end to shark finning. The podcast brought up waste management and plastic pollution, but it did not talk about it as much as I thought it would’ve nor did it bring up sharks. This episode of the podcast also addresses the bayou bridge pipeline which was interesting because its so close to home and i wasn't expecting Louisiana to be mentioned.

Some key terms from this weeks texts include movement hashtag, spin campaign, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The reading identifies a movement hashtag as, “a structure that can aggregate public attention online” (Thorson et al., 2016:4787). A spin campaign can be explained as one, “not designed to provoke conversation and debate. Rather, it is designed to influence public opinion in a particular manner” (Brulle 2010:89). As for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, many of us have probably heard mention of this before, and its title loosely explains and defines what it does, but it is remains important to point out as a key term since it relates very closely to the conversations we’ve been having in our course.

Bibliography

Brulle, Robert J. 2010. “From Environmental Campaigns to Advancing ThePublic Dialog: Environmental Communication ForCivic Engagement.” Environmental Communication 4(1):82–98.

Thorson, Kjerstin, Stephanie Edgerly, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Yu Xu Luping Wang. 2016. “Seeking Visibility in a Big Tent:Digital Communication and the People’s Climate March.” International Journal of Communication 4784–4806.