TY - JOUR
T1 - Showing They Care (Or Don’t)
T2 - Affective Publics and Ambivalent Climate Activism on TikTok
AU - Hautea, Samantha
AU - Parks, Perry
AU - Takahashi, Bruno
AU - Zeng, Jing
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - affective publics
KW - climate change
KW - multimodal analysis
KW - online activism
KW - social media
KW - TikTok
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104678651&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/20563051211012344
DO - 10.1177/20563051211012344
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85104678651
SN - 2056-3051
VL - 7
JO - Social Media and Society
JF - Social Media and Society
IS - 2
ER -