Digital Rhetoric Trends of Climate Denial on Twitter
Understanding topics such as climate change should often be done through different lenses. For my communications final I was able to use inter-discipline skills by opting to investigate more deeply into the discussion of climate denial. It is easy to talk to like minded people, but it is more important to understand the arguments of those you don’t agree with. In this project, I specifically investigated themes that arose in tweets arguing against climate change. This was a challenge for me as I had never written a paper in the communications field. On top of researching background information for my paper I also had to research the proper writing style and format to effectively communicate my findings. When completing the data collection process, I found themes arising that weren’t already discussed in the literature and learned how to propose these new themes in my paper. This paper allowed me to expand my interests into new fields and taught me new techniques to communicate information. Understanding the arguments of climate denial is a necessary step in finding solutions to climate change. Through this paper, I learned that the majority of Tweets centered around a distrust of scientists. This means that current attempts to educate people on climate change don’t work on these people, because there is no ethos established in their eyes. This paper taught me ways to increase my interpersonal skills and how to potentially have productive conversations with climate deniers about climate change. Making science more accessible and being able to communicate it with anyone is goal I strive to work on throughout my career, and this paper reminds me that there is no exception to who deserves science access and communication.
Why Plastic Pollution is the Biggest Threat Marine Birds Face
I was inspired by the documentary A Plastic Ocean to argue that plastic pollution is the biggest threat that marine birds currently face. Even though I had watched this documentary years before, the images of birds ingesting plastic stuck with me. Being able to take information I’ve learned out of the classroom and further investigate it through class assignments has fueled my education with a passion that I know I will one day soon apply to my future career.
