The microvideo platform TikTok has emerged as a popular hub for self-expression and social activism, particularly for youth, but use of the platform’s affective affordances to spread awareness of important issues has not been adequately studied. Through an exploratory multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of popular climate change-hashtagged TikTok videos, we examine how affordances of visibility, editability, and association facilitate the formation of affective publics on TikTok. We describe how TikTok’s features allow creators to construct and propagate multi-layered, affect-laden messages with varying degrees of earnestness, humor, and ambiguity. Finally, we identify recurring affective themes in popular climate change messages by studying not just in-frame content but also the discursive, intertextual, and memetic linkages that propagate affective publics. Collectively, these audiovisual expressions of personal engagement and awareness demonstrate how media affordances can abet, amplify, and confuse discussions of global issues online. These affordances facilitate a unique kind of activism by helping non-expert users intervene in a discussion that generally takes place among scientists and journalists: the question of how serious a problem climate change is and what to do about it.
As contemporary youth learn, play, and socialize online, their activities are often being recorded and analyzed. What should young people know about these data collection and analysis efforts? Although critiques of these new forms of data collection and analysis have grown increasingly loud, the voices of users, and particularly youth, have largely been absent. This paper explores the critical perspectives of youth who are programming with public data about their own learning and social interaction in the Scratch online community. Using a bottomup approach based on ethnographic observation of discussions among these young users, we identify a series of themes in how these youth critique, question, and debate the implications of data analytics. We connect these themes-framed in terms of critical data literacies-to expert critiques and discuss the implications of these findings for education and design.
Past research on the relationship between scientists’ normative beliefs about public engagement in the context of willingness to engage could prove misleading if respondents do not consider the impacts of engagement activities when responding to survey questions. This study asks scientists to report normative beliefs in the context of engagement impacts and explores correlations between these responses and engagement willingness. Results suggest mentioning positive societal impact positively affects normative beliefs, while mentioning lost research time negatively affects normative beliefs. However, changing the measurement context does not affect the non-relationship between normative beliefs and engagement willingness.
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