FEED WINTER 2021 – Web

1,500

OCTOBER 2021 Africa: 13.73 Asia: 103.84 Europe: 122.94 Middle East: 12.83 North America: 262.13 Oceania: 158.13 Central/South America: 55.27 Wire Services: 357.5 All sources combined: 1,086.36

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MB: We’ve just finished a project with Babbel, the languages website.We assessed US and UK print sources, with terms such as climate change, global warming, greenhouse effect, emergency, crisis, heating, breakdown and catastrophe.We then looked visually at the ebbs and flows of these terms over time.We could see “greenhouse effect” being invoked quite a lot at the beginning and fading away, with “crisis” appearing in more recent years. I’m glad this work has so much traction – people find it interesting. And we offer this as open-source datasets for people to use for research. FEED: What have you observed about how the language around the environment changes over time?

HOT TOPIC Seven different regions around the world were sourced, from January 2004 through October 2021

FEED: What about looking at newer digital media and social media?

MB: A lot of researchers are working on aspects of this. I’ve engaged in a little bit regarding social media, but it’s hard because people don’t have to use real names, or often they don’t have geolocation tags, so you don’t know where they’re tweeting from. The democratisation of content production can be seen as a good development, which has changed in recent decades. But there’s also that dystopian element of social media, which is fake news and echo chambers, and all kinds of algorithms that have fed into polarisation.

VIDEO AT FEEDMAGAZINE.TV/LATEST-ISSUE

ON POINT South African channel Politically Aweh uses acerbic humour to highlight the country’s vulnerability to – and culpability for – the climate crisis

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