Digital co-construction of relational values: understanding the role of social media for sustainability

Abstract

There is a deeply relational aspect to the systems people employ for sorting through and prioritizing plural values assigned to social-ecological interactions. Spurred by interpersonal relationships and adhesion to societal core values, such as justice and reciprocity, relational values go beyond instrumental and intrinsic approaches to understanding human behaviour vis-à-vis the environment. Currently, this relational dimension of values is entering the spotlight of the Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) literature focusing on non-material benefits and values people derive from ecosystems, such as aesthetics and sense of place. Relational values foster reflections on appropriateness and morality of preferences and respective behaviours in contributing to collective flourishment across space and time, holding implications for social-ecological justice and sustainability. Recently, several studies explored the potential of using social media data for assessing values ascribed to CES, but did not look at how this emerging approach could contribute to an enhanced understanding of relational values. In order to take up this goal, we conducted a systematic review, screening 140 publications and selecting 29 as relevant for exploring the extent to which relational CES values are inferable through social media. Our results show that social media data can reveal CES values' plural and relational dimension. Social media platforms, thus, can be understood as new arenas for the co-construction of values, where relational values stemming from social-ecological interactions are negotiated and defined. Yet, work on their implications for social-ecological justice and sustainability needs to be extended.

Mapping Urban Park Cultural Ecosystem Services: A Comparison of Twitter and Semi-Structured Interview Methods

“…We find tweets both identified multiple CES per tweet and the presence of multiple CES in zones of Prospect Park. This finding supports a recent review that found social media data can reveal CES values' plural and relational dimensions [57]. Tweets are public messages meant to be shared, with reception of the message read, interpreted, and commented upon by more people than a single interviewer, which may explain some differences between tweets and interviews in the type and proportions of CES elicited.…”

Editorial overview: theoretical traditions in social values for sustainability

“…He proposes multiple principles of normative valuation formation; for example, the importance of social units as the scale of analysis, procedural justice in the deliberation of shared social values, instrumental outcomes being informed by deliberative valuation, and new dialectical approaches to decision-making. Calcagni et al (2019) in contrast consider non-monetary shared social values, exploring how multimedia content coconstructed by the users would expose the relational nature of social values assigned to cultural ecosystem services. These authors conduct a systematic review of studies of cultural ecosystem services using social media and find that recreation values were most frequently quantified, in addition to landscape aesthetics and cultural identity.…”

Next-generation Visitation Models using Social Media to Estimate Recreation on Public Lands

“…These observations suggest that variability in correlations between social media and on-site visitor counts seen here and in previous studies 8,12,20 is derived from local factors influencing visitors' day-to-day decisions about whether and how to share a destination on social media. Choices about whether to post to social media are likely influenced by the characteristics of the local site -perhaps its topography, amenities, predominant activity, or unique natural features -and the ways that people relate to these features 33 . The characteristics of the visitors and the relative contributions of the natural versus the social experience in the motivation for the trip may play a role.…”