Discussing climate change online. Topics and perceptions in online climate change communication in different online public arenas

Abstract

How users discuss climate change online is one of the crucial questions (science) communication scholars address nowadays. This study contributes by approaching the issue through the theoretical concept of online public arenas. The diversity of topics and perceptions in the climate change discourse is explored by comparing different arenas. German journalistic articles and their reader comments as well as scientific expert blogs are analyzed by quantitative manual and automated content analysis (n=5,301). Findings demonstrate a larger diversity of topics and interpretations in arenas with low barriers to communication. Overall, climate change skepticism is rare, but mostly present in lay publics.

Societal problem solver or deficient discipline? The debate about social science in the online public sphere

“…The mass-media-induced discussion arena can be described as an arena with "low barriers to communicate dialogically to an audience that has not been further specified" [Lörcher and Taddicken, 2017]. Starting from journalistic input in the form of news articles, users discuss topics more or less related to news stories with other users.…”

“…Moreover, by focussing on Austrian quality newspapers, the study excluded conversations in other media outlets. Hence, further research on communication about the social sciences online in other thematic contexts could expand this direction by considering also online forums of other news sites, or by comparing different online public arenas (i.e., mass media arena, expert arena, mass-media-induced discussion arena), as suggested by Lörcher and Taddicken [2017].…”

“…More specifically, user comments on online news sites can be identified as a specific form of public arena, namely the "mass-media-induced discussion arena" [Lörcher and Taddicken, 2017, p. 5]. As Lörcher and Taddicken [2017] show, discussions about scientific topics in mass-media-induced discussion arenas differ from those in mass media arenas in terms of topic diversity and interpretations. While there is little detailed knowledge on the communication about the social sciences in the mass media arena [Schäfer, 2012;Scheu and Volpers, 2017], even less is known about mass-media-induced discussions on the social sciences.…”

“…While there is a growing body of research devoted to investigating communication about the social sciences in the mass media arena (see next section), there is a need for investigating the discussion arena. A very common form of this specific arena is the mass-media-induced discussion arena [Lörcher and Taddicken, 2017], i.e. user comments on online news sites.…”

“…Research has identified differences in how discussions in these arenas evolve. For example, a content analysis of the climate change communication in different German online public arenas has identified a higher diversity of topics and interpretations in the mass-media induced discussion arena than in the journalistic or the expert arena [Lörcher and Taddicken, 2017].…”