My approach towards climate change has always been from a very human geography point of view, and even now, I admit, it continues to be very dominated by discussing discourses about climate change. But what I have learnt from this assignment is that we can also analyse media portrayals of climate change from a physical geography way, that of checking facts using paleoclimatology records and looking at the longer timescale rather than the short term shock events that seem to occupy our minds during that short period of time.
My Hypothesis
Right from the beginning, our hypothesis had been that media portrayals of climate change are susceptible to political, environmental and social agendas. This makes them inherently biased, and I am quite sure at the beginning I felt slightly wary about any sort of media portrayals of environmental change. They could not be trusted much, they were always dismal, worrying and exaggerated.
My Conclusion
I believe that after looking through different films, documentaries, news reports and images, my conclusion remains that, indeed, media portrayals of climate change are highly biased, and often reflect the political and social condition during which it was produced. News reports like to report on bad news because bad news sells, hence news about how awful our weather has become would tend to make the headlines. Documentaries do like to attribute the reasons for climate change to either humans or nature, and hardly both, making it very one sided a lot of the times. Movies are mostly sensationalized, and really only get the environmental message across either by sentimentalizing the environment or shocking us silly.
Right… looks like some viewpoints don’t change.
But besides all that, I think that I have truly learnt a few things from this exercise.
Fact checking
I learnt that when analyzing climate change videos, there needs to be a rigorous process of fact checking. Most of the time, not all the sources of information agree or disagree entirely with the facts presented in the video. You really need to pick out what was true and what was not. Often the issue is not about the facts but about the way such facts are interpreted and who made those facts. Facts also change over time because someone may have found new data that contradicts the old data, builds upon it or updates it. It then becomes difficult to ascertain if the media portrayal was entirely wrong or just based on the data at that point in time. It seems that the process is far more difficult that I had first imagined.
Value Judgments
It is not that media portrayals of environmental change are filled with lies, exaggeration and inaccuracies all the time. Most of the time, it is filled with individual values that make the media form biased towards a certain side. Depending on what we value most, we are most likely to convey it in that particular way. From the first instance when the director/producer is deciding the aim and purpose of that documentary/movie/article, they are already weighing in their minds what they value more. Do they value scientific accuracy? Do they believe that doomsday prophecies would do better than positive encouragement in getting the message across? Do they want to promote green fuels as environmentally friendly alternatives because they believe the positive aspects outweigh the negative ones? Sure a lot of the time, such media are also influenced by popular sentiments, political policies and present concerns, and individual values do make up societal concerns and obsessions at that moment. If we were to evaluate the currency, relevancy and accuracy of film based not just on facts but by examining our own values, we may realise very different things about what we are watching and understand why we tend to believe and enjoy some media representations over others.
Climate change and environmental problems are still vague
I mean, yes, I always knew it was vague. But in my mind I was sure that it was all our fault. But having reviewed the data, I realise that there are A LOT of natural processes that can affect our environment and make it difficult for people to ascertain whether those are naturally occurring freak storms or human induced freak storms. The more I read, the more I understood why people do not see the urgency of climate change. The data just seems to be really confusing and conflicting. No scientist has one clear answer though most would say that a lot of what we see today is anthropogenic.
So what other media portrayals have I failed to cover?
I really haven’t talked about television series (not documentary series) or books have I? Or cartoons (like captain planet! HAHA!) or youtube videos. Ahh… there are a lot of media out there that we could analyse. New media is also a form of media – twitter, facebook. It would be interesting to look at the spread of environmental messages over facebook wouldn’t it? But that would be a really different analysis, looking at what people decide to forward or update their status with (usually about the warm winter nowadays I know). I guess from the beginning I had really wanted to focus on documentaries, so my blog ended up as such.
Any ways to improve
TONS! I would really have wanted to do more thorough research into the films, maybe look at interviews from the cast/crew/director to really understand the documentaries a little more. Well, ok I did do that, I just didn’t blog about it. So maybe I should have really blogged what I read and saw. I was also really struggling with video analysis because when I watch a video I really only get the big picture, and its hard to focus on tiny details in the video. Maybe that way I would have really been able to dissect the documentaries on the blog.
I also understand that my blog posts sounded slightly biased and often flippant about the message behind the videos. That was not too good I suppose. It would be better if I had presented a more objective view about the strengths and flaws of each media form.
Last Words
We all view life through tinted glasses and through camera lenses. Similarly, what we know about our environment is very limited, and further limited by the way our mind has decided to frame issues and selectively capture moments to remember. Perhaps the camera lens isn't just physical equipment that decides how we view the world, but our mind itself is a camera, selecting, omitting and weighing. We can only therefore only understand climate change as much as our mind and eyes can register. Media portrayals on environmental change only further help us focus our lenses on particular issues that we already have a keen interest in.
Hoho! And if you can hear me talk as I blog, well, I’m not surprised. I’ve been told that’s the way I blog. Then again, I can hear myself talk as I blog, so LOLLL!!!
And yea, I know I didn’t end off with anything particularly paleo in nature.
Anyway, enjoy these pretty picture. Pictures = media = relevant to blog. YAYY!!
Yea... I really should have done poster analysis as well.