Networked Silences: Background

This means that social media often amplify extreme views, cultivate anger and thrive on polarisation between groups. Commercial search engines, on the other hand, increasingly merge into the background of everyday life and tend to deliver content that does not challenge the existing economic and social order or that confirms prior beliefs. Taken together the result for society is a nearly all-encompassing information infrastructure perfectly designed to distribute content according to various interlinked commercial logics, but almost completely beyond the control of democratic institutions, with vast ramifications for environmental communication.

Understandably, therefore, much of the critical research on the role of social media and search engines in environmental communication is concerned with the more readily noticeable effects on, for example, the discourse around climate change or other ways in which extreme views are normalised or discrimination and problematic power relations are perpetuated. Much less attention is paid to the ways in which social media and search engines help to create silences, reinforce ignorances and render certain relations invisible. Indeed, social media and search engines invisibly shape everyday meaning-making on environmental issues by not only bringing certain understandings to the surface, but also pushing others to the background.

This way search engines and social media affect a broad variety of topics, as these examples based on our previous research and conversations during a programme meeting of the Mistra Environmental Communication programme clarify:

• Influencer culture which is based on images portraying dependence on ideal, idyllic, spectacular nature, and leaves the imperfect, destructive, or mundane nature unseen and unshared. 
• Biodiversity recording apps that reward communication about rare species but discourage sharing sightings of everyday nature.
• Blacklists of topics that social media teams of ENGOs use to avoid concerted negative reactions. 
• Search suggestions that make alternatives to carbon-intensive practices and embodied emissions invisible. 
• Regular internet users who deliberately avoid information they find upsetting, for example by not liking, following, or searching. 
• Disinformation that is strategically spread by exploiting the specific algorithmic logic of platforms and how they interact.
• The deliberate planting of keywords on social media that lead people to use Google to dismiss scientific consensus, and/or confirm fringe or pseudoscience claims, and/or to establish conspiracy theories as plausible.
• Raising doubts by creating noise that drowns out established scientific or even political agreement on specific environmental issues.

In this way, algorithms and affordances of social media and search engines, and the people and organisations that use them, co-produce discourses, practices, and communicative norms that implicitly or explicitly obscure concerns, eclipse certain perspectives, and/or generate ignorances and doubt around environmental issues — we propose to call these networked silences. As part of collective meaning-making around environmental issues, such networked silences have real implications for knowing and doing in everyday life, society and politics, and thus shape the possibilities for meaningful environmental transformations. It is therefore of great importance to map these networked silences and understand the specific mechanisms that enable and sustain them.