DEADLY DISCOURSE

How do we discuss mortality on social media, and how is this related to reigniting the debate about the climate crisis, let alone planet-friendly consumption behaviour? This article tentatively explores a possible connection between the perception of self-mortality and the climate crisis.

Immediate climate action is needed

It is interesting and of contemporary relevance to analyse how social media can be exploited in societally desirable ways. One of the biggest challenges of humankind is the climate crisis. Yet, not many scholars have investigated how this topic is discussed in digital media and how the typical utterances of renunciation, shrinking consumption and changing one’s way of life may be perceived or negotiated among users. It is effectively undeniable that climate change will have a large impact on our current world system and vice versa (Hartmann, 2022). It is also clear that in order to tackle this huge problem, we will have to reduce our consumption, renounce consumption and modify our living standards or at least routines to the standard of approximately 1970 (Sternstunde Philosophie, 2023). Co-determining this thought is the notion of death which I will outline further now.

How we discuss death on social media

In an interview with Sternstunde Philosophie (2021), German sociologist Harald Welzer advocated for more reflection and confrontation with one’s death in the hope that this might lead to a fundamentally different outlook on pressing societal concerns like the climate crisis. The central argument is that if we are more conscious of our limited existence and think reality backwards starting from a desirable future, we tend to deploy resources to sustainable causes more efficiently and willingly. This sparks the interest of how death is discussed in digital media. Indeed, whilst observing death discourse on television and social media, Stratton (2020) made the horrific discovery that our mortality is increasingly disconnected from our (present) lives and that meaning is only attributed to violent deaths online. Sadly, next to useful media use such as announcing (Murrell, Jamie & Penfold-Mounce, 2023) and mourning the death of the beloved digitally (Alexis-Martin, 2020), social media is also a platform to announce or deal with the thoughts of suicide (Brownlie et al., 2021). Despite the research-worthy relationship between social media use and suicide (Sedgwick et al., 2019) and promising algorithm development in this field (Tadesse et al., 2019), it is more sensible to devote the attention to discourse on natural death for the purpose of this article. However, it is unclear to what extent (digital) media discourse on death impacts the understanding of death among children (Longbottom & Slaughter, 2018).

Moving on, the pervasiveness of the ‘spectacular’ death across digital media distorts the realness of one’s death and hinders valuable reflections about it (Stratton, 2020). Countless books have been dedicated to this topic (Hanusch, 2010; Moeller, 2002; Savin-Baden & Mason-Robbie, 2020) and the topic is frequently discussed in light of recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic (Alexis-Martin, 2020) or the Black Lives Matter movement (Bolsover, 2020; Zhang et al., 2019), combining it with the modalities of digital media. Gibbs et al. (2015) attempted to understand the modalities of death on social media and found that by diffusing information about funerals, members enter a process of co-grievance. However, this study did not focus on self-reflections on immortality of the users.

Marrying concepts of death, social media and the climate crisis

To my best knowledge there is no study that explores the relationship between human mortality, consumption behaviour and climate change. The latter is often cut lose from the notion of self-critique (eg. Calcagni et al., 2019; Hamid et al., 2017; Laurell, Sandström & Suseno, 2019). Likewise, there is much literature on digitally experienced death (Gibson, 2007; King & Hayslip Jr., 2002; Pantti & Sumiala, 2009) but these studies remain unconnected to sustainability. To me, this would be a highly interesting and, tragically, also very pressing topic to conduct research about.

It might be interesting to analyse ways of mortality, reduction or renunciation portrayals in social media discourse that engender positive outcomes on consumption behaviour and climate change awareness or call to action.

© Luka Paul Vethake, 2024