Mediations of environmental risk: engagement of young audiences in Uruguay and Ireland

Abstract

This research focuses on young adults' reception of environmental communication channelled through online audio-visual media. In the Anthropocene, it is critical to understand lay-people' perspectives of environmental risks, while advancing situated knowledge on the potential role of pervasive media like YouTube. Young adults are critical networked publics, who remain object of apocalyptic or celebratory interpretations regarding their relationship with media technologies, and their civic agency in the environmental crisis. Through social media platforms, they become strongly inscribed in a diversity of cultures in the convergence of the local, the national and the international level of a globalised world. For instance, Ireland and Uruguay have in common the national sustainability challenges of a robust agricultural economy and culture, while also inserted in the mediatised global scene through a high penetration of online media. The substantial fieldwork of this study consisted of sixteen focus groups with young adults, conducted in Ireland and Uruguay, comprising 109 participants. In these face-to-face led discussions, the question of how young adults engage with online eco-video was explored. It was carried out through the reported and performed selective exposure to a wide variety of short-form videos presenting environmental issues, alongside interpretations and assessment of the perceived influence of these contents. Engagement and distance with environmental risks were further analysed through participants' issue awareness, together with their perceived responsibility and agency, in order to situate the audience reception process in specific cultural mediations. The findings signal the coexistence of environmental concerns situated at the local and the global level, with traces of a North-South divide, while exposure and interpretation of eco-video remains highly globalised. As hypothesised after reviewing levels of environmental concern across time versus the lack of significant mobilisation or massive lifestyle changes worldwide, these new findings support the notion that it remains crucial to analyse more sophisticated forms of denial, connecting with communication barriers dependent on dissonance, doom, distance and identity.