Blog Action Day’s Intro video
This years’s Blog Action Day theme is “climate change.” I’d like to focus on language.
So what’s in a word? Not much and a lot. Words don’t actually carry any meaning. Our belief in this comes from a fallacious cultural understanding of language based on the “conduit metaphor,” which views communicate as the transportation of things. For example, we say “I don’t get the idea,” or “Am I getting this across to you?” as if words contain information. But is this what really happens? Look at the word “message,” one of the core terms used in traditional information theory to denote a self-contained unit of meaning. Simple enough, yet if I say, “Did you read the message,” or “You don’t get the message, do you?” those are two different concepts. In either case “message” depended on context to convey its meaning.
Likewise “climate” and “change” also have different meanings in different communication environments. This was the stroke of brilliance behind Bush’s creation of the phrase, because it drains the situation of any real meaning or urgency, no matter how it’s communicated. Or take “global warming.” Both words actually make us feel really good, don’t they? But if we were to say planetary heat death? Or global ecological catastrophe? Or my fave, vampiric capitalist climate chaos? What kind of images do they invoke? As you can see, though words don’t “contain” meaning, they can frame our attitudes, especially when contextualized under certain conditions.
ecoAmerica, which has tested a lot of different phrases in focus groups and phone surveys recommends, “deteriorating atmosphere” (you can read the report here). To me it sounds rather weak and inept. Nonetheless, the report’s recommendation to use new language to frame environmental issues created a bit of a dustup between the New York Times’s John M. Broder and George Lakoff at the Huffington Post, which centered on whether or not framing language can impact social change.
In my view framing and language metaphors can influence the way we think about issues, but that they do not program how we think. I believe all communication is contextual and negotiated. The idea of mass media frames is not much different than Walter Lippman’s suggestion that democracy requires public manipulation and propaganda. A primary solution to climate ______ (fill in the blank) is local. We need to have discussion and dialogue amongst ourselves to come up with solutions, not media tested mind frames spewed by satellite beamed talking heads. I realize that mass media have a generalized impact on how we view the world, but a few linguistic “climate” experts cannot compete with the mythological language of advertising. Until we stop selling cars as the next great green fetish, I don’t think any amount of framing can compete with the context that commodities enrich our lives.
Finally, we need to acknowledge this isn’t just “climate change,” but it’s “lifestyle” and “human habitat” change as well.
My experience has been that mass media is best left to the corporate overlords who rule that realm, and to do an Aikido maneuver around them. Through pattern recognition (my alternative to critical thinking), we can step aside as these frames are hurled at us, and let them boomerang back to the source. Meanwhile we can have groovy film festivals and house screening of ecologically oriented documentaries served with local, bioregional fare as we reassert our community spaces away from the mass mind manipulators who claim to know what is best for the planet.
