Polarisation and echo chambers? Making sense of the climate issue with social media in everyday life

Abstract

This article analyses how people use social media to make sense of climate change, exploring climate issues as part of everyday communication in media-saturated societies. Building on prominent themes in the environmental communication literature on social media, such as mobilisation and polarisation, we respond to calls for more qualitative and interpretative analysis. Our study therefore asks how people use social media in everyday life to make sense of climate issues, and it expands on previous findings in the field through a qualitative typology of everyday social media use. The empirical data stems from in-depth interviews with Norwegians who are engaged in climate issues, with informants ranging from activists to declared sceptics, although we find widespread ambivalence across group positions. Our findings contribute to disentangling contradictory findings in the field through a discussion of how climate change is part of everyday communication.