Encoding-decoding-climate-change-communication-Nick-Howlett-2015

© Copyright 2015 Nick Howlett, School of Humanities, Language and Social Science, Griffith University 1
Encoding/decoding climate change communication: toward a new social research
framework
Nicholas Howlett
School of Humanities, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
nicholas.howlett@griffithuni.edu.au
Unpublished paper

Encoding/decoding climate change communication: toward a new social research
framework
To date, the majority of scholarly research into the public communication of climate change has
been focused on three main areas: the communication of risk; the dynamics of debate in legacy
media such as newspapers, and how these debates are framed by various actors. Much of the
audience research on this topic has also mostly been concerned with frame analysis, notably
rhetorical critique. The significance of the degree to which Internet-based platforms have displaced
legacy media is not reflected in the research literature, although this is beginning to change. This
article will argue that this shift to networked communications and the massive expansion in
communicative possibilities this represents requires a reconceptualization of audience research on
climate change communication. The article therefore proposes a new approach grounded in an
encoding/decoding model that accommodates the pluralistic nature of internet texts and their
audiences. This approach identifies opportunities to harness newly emerged internet audience
research tools – ‘big data’ – to analyse the production, circulation, interpretation and reproduction
of communication about climate change by online audiences.
Keywords: climate change communication; audiences; social networks; encoding/decoding model;
online social research

Introduction
Climatic change as a consequence of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases is the salient issue
currently facing humankind. Anthropogenic global warming, (to use the more scientifically accurate
term for ‘climate change’ (Wayne 2013)), poses an existential threat to the biosphere and to human
societies. As the United Nations peak body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts
it, “continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all
components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible
impacts for people and ecosystems” (Pachauri & Meyer 2014, p. 8). There is a strong consensus from
climate scientists around this conclusion: one study of all peer-reviewed science journal articles
published on the topic between 1993 and 2003 found all 928 papers were in agreement with this position
(Oreskes 2004, p. 1686). A more thorough recent review (n =11,944) of the scientific literature found
that 97.1% of papers endorsed the position that humans are causing global warming (Cook et al. 2013,
p. 1).
The IPCC recommends significant cuts to global CO2 emissions to avoid the “high to very high
risk of severe, widespread and irreversible” global impacts by the end of the 21st
century (Pachauri &
Meyer 2014, p. 17). But as pressing as this scenario is, and despite the scientific consensus, neither the
general public nor policymakers have been galvanized into taking the decisive action that is needed on a
global level to effect these cuts. There is an “asymmetry of intentions and impacts” (Whitmarsh 2009, p.
13).
Main themes from the climate change communication research literature
There is an overarching sense from the literature that the urgency of climate change is not being
recognized. Why is this? Could this failure to act on this immense imperative be due to the way climate
change has been communicated? Scholars from numerous disciplines have attempted to account for this
phenomenon: the major themes from the research are outlined below. For the sake of brevity, this is not

an exhaustive list – see Moser 2010 and Parton & Morrison 2011 for a more extensive reviews of the
literature.
Climate change challenges cognition, perception and heuristics
The research literature points to several challenges that make engagement on climate change difficult.
The release of greenhouse gases are invisible, so offer no affordance of immediacy (Kirkman 2007 in
Moser 2010, p. 33); the effects of climate change are often spatially and temporally distant (Rosensweig
et al. 2008, Hegerl et al. 2007 & Zwiers & Hegerl 2008 in Moser 2010, p. 33); action (or any lack
thereof) is unlikely to produce perceptible effects within our lifetimes (Solomon et al. 2009 in Moser
2010, p. 34), and humans seem to be unable to cognitively process the long-term implications of current
actions (De Martino et al. 2006, Kahneman et al. 1982 & Marx et al. 2007 in Moser 2010, p. 34).
Uncertainty arising from the complexity, the scale of the issue and from the imprecision of scientific
measurements impedes the mind from processing the problem in a systematic way (Lorenzoni et al.
2005; p. 1394, Nicholls 1999; p. 1385 & Wynne 1992 in Moser 2010, p. 35).
The public ‘information deficit’
Most early communicators of climate change were physical scientists or environmentalists who were
unfamiliar with the body of social science research into communication and behavior (Moser 2010, p.
33). As a result, climate change communication research and practice followed an “information deficit
model” (Owens 2000 in O’Neill & Hulme 2009) in which scientists presumed that their audiences were
“ignorant and need to be ‘supplied’ with good, factual information” (Oreskes 2009 in Boykoff 2009, p.
2). This implication of this model is that once expert opinion on climate change had been effectively
transmitted to the public, a consensus would form and this greater public engagement would lead to
effective policymaking on climate change (Nerlich et al. 2009, p. 99).
However, the insights of the social sciences and other disciplines have added to the theory and
practice of climate change communication over the last two decades. The literature has moved away

from a focus on what Nerlich et al. refer to as the “public understanding of science model” (2009, p. 99)
and its assumed information deficit. Researchers and practitioners alike have rejected the implication
that there is a passive audience awaiting the one-way transmission of expert knowledge (Nerlich 2009,
p. 106).
Uncertainty has been exploited to delay or prevent action
Another prominent feature that has been well documented in the literature is how this scientific and
cognitive uncertainty has been exploited by powerful groups with an interest in maintaining the fossil
fuel status quo (Dunlap & McCright 2010; McCright & Dunlap 2011). These groups have amplified this
uncertainty in popular opinion via coordinated disinformation campaigns (Hoggan 2009, p. 2, Oreskes
& Conway 2010, Ch. 6). Spence et al. (2012, p. 968) characterizes this as an “uncertainty transfer”,
where valid uncertainty over one part of the climate science (e.g. rate of sea level rise), produces
skepticism about other less contentious aspects (e.g. role of human activity on levels of atmospheric
CO2). The result of the disinformation is public disengagement from the issue and a lack of political
action on climate change (Revkin 2014, p. 140).
The rhetoric of orchestrated denialism may be losing its potency, however. Some scholars claim
evidence of social learning “as actors build on their experiences in relation to climate change science
and policy making” (Carvalho & Burgess 2005, p. 1457).
Frames help identify the gap between knowledge and action
In order to identify knowledge gaps and routes around the disinformation from vested interest groups,
climate change communication research has more recently begun to look at the cognitive effects of
rhetoric on the level of knowledge about the issue and the resultant effects on behaviour (Moser &
Dilling 2011, p. 162).

Frame analysis features prominently as a theoretical approach in the literature. In this context,
frame analysis refers to the analysis of how a communication source, (for example, a newspaper article),
encourages a particular interpretation of information about a topic or an event.
Researchers have looked at how climate change is framed variously by the mass media (e.g.
Boykoff & Boykoff 2007; Olausson 2009; O’Neill et al. 2015), by scientists (e.g. Lewandowsky et al.
2012), by opinion leaders and celebrities (e.g. Boykoff & Goodman 2009; Nisbet & Kotcher 2009), by
political conservatives (e.g. Bain et al. 2012; McCright & Dunlap 2011) and by ‘green’ businesses (e.g.
Prudham 2009). Climate change communication scholars and practitioners alike have used the insights
garnered from this body of research to develop new frames that help segments of the public make sense
of climate change. Prominent examples of this include framing climate change as a moral issue to help
engage evangelical Christians in the US (Wilkinson 2010) and framing it as a national security issue to
connect with conservatives (Moser & Dilling 2011, p. 167).
Frame analysis has also been used extensively to scrutinize the communication of climate risk to
the public by scientists and journalists (e.g. Hulme 2009; Leiserowitz 2006; Risbey 2008; Russell 2006).
Opportunities to address gaps in climate change communication research
Culture – missing in action
There are several main deficiencies of the research into climate change communication to date. The first
is the dearth of analysis of climate change from the standpoint of culture. Hulme calls this “uppercase
‘Climate Change’”: climate change “as a series of complex and constantly evolving cultural discourses”,
not a “lower-case physical phenomenon to be ‘solved’.” Hulme explains that scholars need to examine
closely the idea (his emphasis) of climate change – “the matrix of power relationships, social meanings
and cultural discourses that it reveals and spawns” (Hulme 2007).
In a sense, climate change communication is now having its own ‘cultural turn’: the social
sciences came late to climate change communication (Rayner & Malone 1998, in Nerlich et al. 2009, p.

98). This is timely as well, because there are large areas of discourse around climate change that have
been marginalized, including “visual and aural communication, electronic and digital media, and
perhaps most glaringly, popular culture” (Pedelty 2015, p. 139). These have been pushed to the
periphery by the “almost exclusive” focus on “spoken word, writing, and textual rhetorics” in climate
change communication research (Pedelty 2015, p. 139).
An audience of ‘publics’ and a public of ‘audiences’
The second of these deficiencies is an inadequate consideration of audience(s). Because a strong cultural
dimension is missing from most research, as noted above, only a few studies of climate change
communication have built on the theoretical foundation of audience research traditions to provide a
more granular conception of audience.
The climate change communication literature typically speaks of an homogenous ‘public’. If
demarcated at all by individual scholars, it is conceived of as a amorphous, global public (e.g. Boykoff
2011), or as a series of ‘publics’ constituted from the general populaces of one or more nations (e.g.
Lorenzoni & Pidgeon 2006) or locales (e.g. Bulkeley 2000).
To date, there are only a few pieces of climate change communication research that have
differentiated the audience further. The principal of these is the Yale Project on Climate
Communication’s longitudinal study Global Warming’s Six Americas 2009: An audience segmentation
analysis (Leiserowitz et al. 2009), which constructs a typology of the American public by segmenting it
into six unique audiences distinguished by level of engagement with climate change. The audience
segmentation used in the study is based on a social marketing methodology developed by the advertising
industry (Hine et al. 2014, p. 442). Hine gives a critical appraisal of Leiserowitz et al. (2009)’s study
and others that have replicated or extended the study’s market segmentation methodology in other
locations. This studies concludes that there are significant conceptual and methodological issues with
segmentation research.

As noted earlier, frame analysis is commonly used in climate change communication research.
The notion of a ‘public’, in most of these framing studies, is that of an audience that is ‘exposed’ to the
persuasive influence of the media, scientists, opinion leaders, deniers and other actors — the “unwitting
target or a passive recipient of media stimuli”—that is a hallmark of the behavioural ‘media effects’
tradition (McQuail 2005, p. 402).
Other scholars have situated their conceptualization of ‘public’ within a ‘public sphere’
(Habermas 1989) — see Anderson 2009; Boykoff & Yulsman 2013; Heinrichs & Peters 2001.
With the evolution of the mediascape (Appadurai 1990, p. 296) away from traditional media to
digital platforms, however, the concept of ‘audience’ needs to be reconfigured. A new understanding of
‘audience’ is needed to accommodate the complexities contained in the shift from one-to-many to
many-to-many communication, and the explosion of user-generated content (Schäfer 2012, p. 527).
The dynamism of the ‘public sphere’ is a useful starting point for reconceiving the ‘publics’ of
online climate change communication as ‘audiences’. A key feature of online platforms is the robust
production, reproduction, contestation and interpretation of meanings that takes place within them
(Collins & Nerlich 2014; Koteyko et al. 2013, p. 74). A consideration of online ‘audiences’ has to
account for pluralities of meaning and be able to see audiences simultaneously as users, consumers,
producers as well as ‘publics’. To extend the concept of audience in this way is to build “insightfully on
the history of audiences and audience research to reveal continuities and changes in the mediation of
identity, sociality, and power” (Livingstone & Das, 2013, p. 104). Researchers needs to prioritize the
reconceptualization of online audiences, as very little research has been undertaken in this area so far, as
the following section will outline.
More research needed in online climate change communication
The third main deficiency of climate change communication research is the sparsity of scholarly enquiry
into the online communication of climate change. The mass media landscape has undergone tremendous

change during the time that climate change has become a significant issue of global concern. Digital
platforms have been gaining prominence since the early 1990s as a means of mobilization, information
dissemination and dialogue (Moser 2010 p. 42). With the introduction of social networks in the early
2000s, the uptake of digital mass media has accelerated on an unprecedented scale. As of January 2015,
there were a reported 2.08 billion active social media accounts worldwide (Kemp 2015).
The massive volume of data available on online platforms represents opportunities and
challenges for researchers (Koteyko et al. 2015, p. 149). ‘Big data’ tools for search, aggregation and
analysis have enabled corpus linguistics and discourse analysis studies with extremely large sample
sizes (e.g. n = 1.3 million blog posts (Elgesem et al. 2015); n = 5.7 million tweets (Jang & Hart 2015)).
Online climate change communication researchers have studied audience dynamics from a range of
internet datasets: blog posts (Fløttum et al. 2014), website reader comments (Koteyko et al. 2012) and
tweets and hashtags (Kirilenko & Stepchenkova 2014).
On the other hand, accessing data from companies like Twitter and Facebook is neither free or
easy. Access to the Application Programming Interface (API)s of social media companies is a
commodity, and the data is proprietary, which raises questions about the reproducibility of publicly-
funded research (Kinsley 2014). What is included in different data streams and samples provided by
proprietary APIs is not clear, in other words, how these APIs provide information is not transparent
(boyd & Crawford 2012).
However, despite the volume of available raw data, online communication of climate change is
under-researched (Koteyko et al. 2015, p. 151). Studies of online communication of climate change
have not been sufficiently contextualized with theories of social and cultural change (Schäfer 2012, p.
537).
Another major issue with research into the use of online media by the general public is that it is
not often distinguished separately from ‘legacy’ or traditional media (Schäfer 2012, p. 535).

Nevertheless, the research that has been done in this area has yielded some compelling insights:
scientists and the institutions they represent play only a limited role in online communication (Schäfer
2012, p. 529); non-governmental organizations are the “champions” of the online climate change
communication space (Schäfer 2012, p. 530); the online communication around climate change by
politicians, corporations, public relations firms and similar classes of actors is limited (Schäfer 2012, p.
531).
Looking at structure and content of online communication on climate change, researchers found
that ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ were among the five most common keywords used in all
English language blogs and Tweets (Schäfer 2012, p. 532). Other researchers found that the quality of
science communication online is poor, especially on blogs (Gavin 2009, p. 137, in Schäfer 2012, p.
533). Online media appear to some researchers to be inadequate for “evidence-based, logical
deliberation” (Malone 2007, p. 20, in Schäfer 2012, p. 533). Similarly, online debates on climate change
are not qualitatively ‘better’ than their offline equivalents, despite the hope expressed by some social
theorists that online debate would be more inclusive and deliberative (Schäfer 2012, p. 533).
The most significant shortcoming of the existing literature on online communication of climate
change, says Schäfer (2012, p. 537), is the lack of studies into uses and effects of online media. Schäfer
offers uses-and-gratifications theory and two-step flow theory as two possible approaches for
researching online publics and their motivations (2012, p. 535).
Both theories conceive of audiences as active producers of meaning, which gives them a certain
explanatory clout. Indeed, both have been deployed to examine climate change communication (e.g.
Nisbet & Kotcher 2009; Speck 2011). Whether they can be used to counter the absence of a cultural
dimension in climate change communication research is doubtful, though. The central weakness of both
theories is, in Stuart Hall’s words, that they concentrate on the “level of message exchange” (Hall 1980,
p. 128). The “complex structure of relations” (Hall 1980, p. 128) within the communication process is
almost entirely absent from uses and gratifications theory, but less so from two-step flow theory.

As noted above, a key feature of online platforms is the plurality of meaning and interpretation
by audiences. So perhaps another more suitable alternative to these approaches might be Stuart Hall’s
‘encoding/decoding’ model (Hall 1980), which is better able to account for how meaning is produced,
circulated, interpreted and reproduced by active audiences.
A new research framework: encoding/decoding audiences with help from big data
Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model views the production of meaning by audiences through a
political and socio-cultural lens (p. 129). The “practices of audience reception”, he says, “cannot be
understood in simple behavioural terms”:
“The typical processes identified in positivistic research on isolated elements – effects, uses,
‘gratifications’ – are themselves framed by structures of understanding, as well as being produced by
social and economic relations, which shape their ‘realization’ at the reception end of the chain and
which permit the meanings signified in the discourse to be transposed into practice or consciousness
(to acquire social use value or political effectivity)” (Hall 1980, p. 129).
Importantly, Hall emphasizes the heterogeneous “subjective capacity” of audiences (Hall 1980, p. 135).
He delineates four steps or distinct “moments” in any “communicative event”: production, circulation,
consumption and reproduction (Hall 1980, p. 128). Producers encode messages in the first stage.
Audiences decode these messages in the consumption phase and interpret meanings in the reproduction
phase (Hall 1980, p128). The audience can decode a plurality of meanings: they can choose to take the
intended meaning (the “dominant/hegemonic position”), they can accept parts of the dominant meaning
but not others (the “negotiated position”) or they can reject the dominant meaning entirely (the
“oppositional position”) (Hall 1980, pp. 136-138).
With the predominance of online platforms, and with access to the analytical tools of ‘big data’,
it becomes feasible to evaluate the plurality of meanings being produced, circulated, consumed and
reproduced in the context of a given communicative event, or range of events, on a scale not previously

possible. For researchers, online data requires less resources for collection and analysis, offers more
datasets, including global datasets, and involves minimal experimental interference (boyd & Crawford
2012). Signified meanings can be collected longitudinally to study their evolution over time.
Conclusion
Regarding climate change communication, an appropriate strategy would be to parse data gathered
using ‘big data’ with the encoding/decoding model to look at how an audience chooses to engage with a
dominant meaning, how it takes a negotiated position or how it opposes the dominant position. For
example, how a government climate policy statement is reacted to, supported, critiqued and re-
transmitted online. Or why audiences take more of an oppositional position to communications encoded
by scientists but engage more with the dominant position as encoded by an NGO.
Online climate change communication research is in its early stages, with many opportunities for
further study. It has already revealed much. But it has become clear that certain gaps exist in our
understanding that need to be overcome so that communications efforts on this issue can help amplify
the “social use value or political effectivity” (Hall 1980; p. 129) of our responses to climate change.

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