at the University of Washington. Her books include Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition (2011) and Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power (2016).
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech, and Activists Are Vying for Our Future, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book discusses the ambivalence that permeates the internet. That is, it discusses the fact that the internet is capable of being used to both facilitate and obstruct quality information and discussion. I am building here on the great work of Whitney Philips and Ryan Milner, who use the concept of ambivalence to emphasize the positive and negative potential of online cultural expression, rather than in its colloquial sense to refer to indecision (I could go either way) or to refer to ambiguity (I’m not sure what she means).Learn more about The Mediated Climate at the Columbia University Press website.
The page opens with this reference to a memo from Facebook executive that illustrates the essence of platform ambivalence:Andrew Bosworth describes the company’s intentional disregard for truth, as evidence. “We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. … That can be bad if they make it negative. … Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. … The ugly truth is … anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.It then goes on to describe some of the efforts by climate activists to call out platforms, and professionals whose work supports them, on their environmental ambivalence.
Here is the rest of my page 99:This ambivalence has spurred activists to turn their attention to platforms. Climate Creatives, a non-profit association of creatives professions, together with Greenpeace, and the youth civic engagement group Hip Hop Caucus, are leading a coalition of climate organizations calling on the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok to ban fossil fuel advertising from their platforms. Anusha Narayanan, Greenpeace U.S. climate campaign manager explains: “The definition of hypocrisy is social media giants saying they care about environmental impacts while accepting millions of dollars from fossil fuel corporations to peddle their propaganda.”The tests works! Page 99 is a great one for the reader to get a sense of the whole book and how it details the ways the muck in our communication environment gets in the way of our ability to effectively address the climate crisis, and what people are doing to change that.
In the United Kingdom, the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN) is trying to ensure ad industry ethics is updated to reflect the contemporary realities of the technology behind advertising today. Harriet Kingaby, co-chair of CAN describes how this especially pertains to climate information. She says that the internet has brought about mass data collection, targeted ads, and enormous amounts of ad space (aka ad inventory), factors that are are “turbocharging climate disinformation.” Advertisers are the major driving force behind platforms. And because platforms are the new gatekeeper, promoting the most salacious content and syphoning us off into like-minded groups, advertisers are complicit in creating this toxic environment, by inadvertently paying to support it.
The Mediated Climate emphasizes the importance of thinking about the climate crisis not just as a physical world phenomenon, but also a communication phenomenon — a story about our degraded information and communications environment, where bad faith flourishes, making noise and muddling messages while emissions mount and societies struggle to head off catastrophe. It's also a story of journalists, activists, scientists and other professionals of all stripes who are fighting to improve both our physical and media landscapes. And it’s an invitation to join them.
--Marshal Zeringue
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