Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of PM2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

Yanshuang Zhang

Journal of Management and Sustainability, 2017, vol. 7, issue 1, 76-93

Abstract: The emergence of social media over the last decade has substantially altered not only the means people communicate with each other but also the whole online ecosystems. For the common public in particular, social media enables and broadens the social conversation that anyone interested can engage in on urgent social problems such as environmental pollution. In China, the ever-thickening air pollution smothering most urban cities in recent years has provoked a nationwide discussion, and popular social media like Weibo has been fully utilised by various social actors to participate in this ¡°green speak¡±. This paper examines the civil discourse about the deteriorating air pollution on China¡¯s largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to understand how different social actors respond to and reconstruct the reality. Through a discourse analysis aided by a text analytics/ visualisation software¡ªLeximancer, this paper investigates the civil discourse from three angles: the demographics, the discursive strategies and the potential social effect. The result suggests that proactive civil engagement in this issue has produced an environmental discourse with a wide range of topics involved, and that the benign interactions between social actors could give rise to a proactive interactional mode between Chinese state and civil society which would definitely be beneficial to the democratisation process in contemporary China.

Keywords: digital environmentalism; social media; air pollution; civil discourse; proactive interaction; Weibo; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jms/article/view/63026/36057 (application/pdf)
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jms/article/view/63026 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ibn:jmsjnl:v:7:y:2017:i:1:p:76-93

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Management and Sustainability from Canadian Center of Science and Education Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Canadian Center of Science and Education ().