Blog 4 draft - Effective Climate Communication and Revising Our Voices on Digital Spaces

Ronald McDonald in Bangkok

Globalized Experience

As an American, I have been quite lucky to travel a fair amount, mostly in Latin America and Asia, and to live abroad in Asia for about 14 years of my life, and counting. Through this, I have gained a global, personalized, transcultural perspective on my own cultural identity. I often reflect that I never felt my own culture so deeply until it was thrown into relief, physically, by the shapes and sounds and aromas and flavors so foreign to my own ‘normal,’ but even more deeply, emotionally and intellectually, by the challenges to my own ways of being and knowing and acting, social and philosophical challenges. These challenges have been difficult but ultimately welcome, as they have either reshaped or reified my sense of self, changing me or catalytically allowing me to understand myself and the world in new ways. Same me, new understanding, as well as newer versions of myself, and new understandings. I have often told friends that I never felt more American than in my first year in Japan almost 20 years ago. More to the point, I never realized how specifically Californian I am.

My first year in China as an English Language Fellow, 2017-2018, was probably the most difficult period of culture shock I have ever been through. If I had been sent to Beijing or anywhere on the East coast (where I now live), it would not have been so intense, but I was sent to the megacity of Chongqing in the southwest. The fundamentals of Putonghua, the official national dialect and what one studies when one wishes to learn standard mainland Chinese, the dialect of the national news and government, and the lingua franca connecting the vastly different, often mutually unintelligible regional dialects proliferated throughout the country. My bare linguistic fundamentals were almost useless in Chongqing, at least with my neighbors and local community. I felt thrown into a confusing, seemingly unfriendly, and incomprehensible place.

That’s how it felt, anyway, for much of my first few months. It changed, of course. I made foreign friends, I made Chinese friends, and I began to love my students. Part of the problem was that I was spoiled, as an American, as a white man, as a tourist and traveler. Japan was very easy to adjust to, because Japanese people are largely accommodating and welcoming, if very often in a superficial way. My travel experiences pre-China, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, were colored by the general level of hospitality which are endemic to these cultures. China, by comparison, does not naturally (seemingly) possess these cultural traits. I have learned over the years, that what I see as unfriendly is very often a misunderstanding of communication patterns, a partial understanding of context, and off the mark awareness of how politeness/impoliteness works. Chinese ways of thinking and doing in the world are not set up, necessarily, to welcome outsiders in, nor should they be. My “free and open access as a white American male” didn’t quite work there the way I had come to expect it to.

I had to learn and accommodate. I had to shift, I had to learn to live in ambiguity. I had to stop (always) asking “why.” I had to relearn how to communicate. I had to change.

Globalization and the Environmental Crisis

Global hegemonic corporations stamp their mono-cultural imprint across the world; Coca-Cola in Harare, Mickey Mouse in Shanghai, Starbucks in Bogota, Ronald McDoland in Bangkok. What is lost? What is devalued? Where is the local? Is it getting squeezed out? My students in Japan and China love Western fast food, films, and video games. But they also very often seem to remain deeply connected to their cultures on many levels, and both countries strive to maintain a value of celebrating and preserving local cultural traditions in the face of globally branded mono-culture.

In a TEDx youth talk from Tbilisi, student Katherine Ocher mentions two Japanese philosophical concepts as potentially being in danger in the face of globalized consumer patterns. Both are related to sustainability and human health. One, the notion of hara hachi bun (腹八分), hold that a healthy eating pattern is to never exceed eating more than 80% of what will make us full. This is not only a cultural idea that should not be lost to the Japanese and other Confucian-inspired Asian cultures, it is the kind of idea that should be exported to the West, whose consumption patterns in North American and Europe tend to over-excessiveness. The other Japanese idea Ocher mentions is shinrinyoku森林欲, or “forest bathing.” Japan’s cultural veneration for the natural world is embedded in the notion that experiencing nature is healing and therapeutic, and something one should do regularly to maintain balance and regularity in both physically and mentally. Ocher argues that economic globalism threatens local erasures of culture, and that we can and should include space for sharing cultural diversity, we can “create a future which is not only globalized, but is also deeply rooted with the richness of our shared humanity” (Ocher 5:50).

But this sanguine ethos, one I share deeply, does not address the impact of economic “climate realism,” for those who may concede to at least some of the realities of climate change, or the more sinister climate-denialism and narco-capitalist tendencies of profit-driven motives to maintain reliance on fossil fuels and practices such as rainforest destruction, and the devastating consequences for especially the poor of the Global South. These are the true horrors of economic globalization in the face of the climate crisis.

Effective Climate Communication and Revising Our Voices for Global Practices on Digital Spaces

A fundamental prerequisite to entering the climate discussion, the Climate Discourse, particularly from the positionality of privilege that I hold, is to educate myself as much as possible, and to never attempt to speak directly for others. James Gee says that “it is the fundamental job of education to give people bigger and better discourse maps…Discourses…exist as the work we do to get people and things recognized in certain ways and not others, and they exist as maps which constitute our understandings. They are, then, social practices and mental entities, as well as material realities” (Gee 23). These social practices increasingly materialize on social media platforms in their material reality, and it is incumbent on the participant in such serious and consequential discussions to enter into them as well-informed as possible, but also with an eye towards maintaining an honest self-awareness of one’s unique and always partial and provisional perspective on the issues. Enter the conversation to learn more. Write from a “middle-voice,” “free [ourselves] from the readerly imperative to convince others of the superiority of [our] position” (Tinnell 237). This textual re-conceptualization of voice forces one to maintain an honest but still provisional and changeable positionality. It opens an affective channel to ensure an emotive and embodies connection to both our own emotional landscapes in light of our own experiences as well as inviting access to the emotional elements of climate change realities.

In discussing the changing realities and complexities of the U. S. political discourse at the turn of the 21^st century, including foremost the advent of the Internet’s inclusion to the various genres enacting the discourse, Charles Bazerman presciently noted “new forms of electronic communication [have entered] into this already rich field, with the potential of changing the total ecology of political communication – displacing some earlier modes, supplementing and transforming others, and putting all the existing components in a new relation” (Bazerman 26). The promise and peril of new media opportunities to enter the climate discourse require deft and careful strategic choices. Framing for self-efficacy and hope using motivational language to encourage action, rather than a doom and gloom data-dump of despair. “People feel a greater sense of self-efficacy and believe their actions will decrease climate change impacts if they receive massages that frame climate change in terms of what they gain from action versus what they lose from inaction” (Armstrong et al. 65).

We cannot forget that the populations who are most affected by climate change span Western and non-Western cultures, and have generational and gendered differences in the impacts experienced. “A true understanding of our climate-change predicament requires interdisciplinary scholarship and effective communication of that scholarship to the public…Climate messaging needs to explain how our social, political, and economic systems helped cause this crisis and hinder efforts to address it” (Heald 11). Noting the thinking of climate researchers Kari Norgaard and Amitav Ghosh, as well as the 2025 Laudato si’ encyclical from Pope Francis, Seth Heald argues for the need for more directly moral persuasion and thinking in the climate discourse. Imagining the humanity we all share in the plight of the most affected, to see the despair and not envision change, to never stop thinking of the future and where this is all headed, and most importantly, to never stop thinking about what can be done to realize that better future. “this sort of imagining can be greatly aided ending our climate silence…recognizing and challenging moral disengagement, and acknowledging the worldwide moral issues surrounding climate change” (Heald 13).

Social Media

The dangers of social media and Internet use are of course fraught with risks, and require a certain amount of media literacy to navigate. ASEAN bloggers Bimo Andrio and Rika Safrina, discussing the reality and promise of extant social media platforms in the fight against climate change, noted a 2020 study by Euronews.com in which it was found that with a YouTube search on the term “climate change,” 21 percent of the results included false information. “Even worse, many of these videos were having adverts from big corporations such as Apple, Unilever, and even Greenpeace” (Andrio and Safrina). AI’s incorporation into running the algorithm will inevitably speed up the number of miscues and amount of misinformation, so even greater vigilance and a critical lens are more important than ever.

That said, social media can drive change, allowing political and environmental information and potential action anywhere the Internet is available. Open discussion on blogs and Internet forums can be excellent places to learn and become informed, and it is possible for a real sense of community and self-efficacy to be fostered through online discourse and calls to action.

Works cited

Andrio, Bimo & Rika Safrina. “The Power of Social Media to Fight Climate Change.” ASEAN Climate Change and Energy Project: Phase 2 (ACCEPT II), Jan. 13. 2021, https://accept.aseanenergy.org/the-power-of-social-media-to-fight-climate-change/.

Armstrong, Anne K., Marianne E. Krasny, and Jonathon P. Schuldt. Communicating Climate Change: A Guide for Educators. Cornell University Press, 2018.

Bazerman, C. "Genre and Identity: Citizenship in the Age of the Internet." The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change (2001).

Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. Routledge, 1999.

Heald, Seth. "Climate Silence, Moral Disengagement, and Self-Efficacy: How Albert Bandura's Theories Inform our Climate-Change Predicament." Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 59.6 (2017): 4-15.

Ocher, Katherine. “The Impact of Globalization on Cultural Identity.” YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks Mar. 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSYdQ14JewE&t=10s.