Taking the environment online. Issue and link networks surrounding personal green living blogs
| Pages | 248-264 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2013-0052 |
| Published date | 25 February 2014 |
| Date | 25 February 2014 |
| Author | Jutta Haider |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
Taking the environment online
Issue and link networks surrounding personal
green living blogs
Jutta Haider
Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to explore the construction and configuration of environmentally friendly
living through making visible the link networks that surround personal greener living blogs. The
following questions guide the exploration: which types of organisations/actors structure the issue
network of green living blogs as it emerges through links? How do these links contribute to carving
out thematic areas as particularly influential for the construction of what greener living is seen to
mean?
Design/methodology/approach – Mixed method, a link and co-link analysis of 46 personal blogs
carried out with the IssueCrawler tool, is backed up by a qualitative textual analysis of central
personal green living blogs to contextualise the resulting networks.
Findings – The resulting network shows an issue space that is divided in two halves: one half where
green living is largely an issue of relating outwards (e.g. by broaching consumption) and another half
which is inwards oriented (e.g. beauty products, personal well-being). A large integrative centre of
mainly personal blogs functions as a hub for different notions of greener living, structured around
pleasure vs a problem focus, and along inwards vs outwards orientation.
Research limitations/implications – The empirical material consists of a sample of Swedish
language blogs, which has implications for the outcome of the study.
Practical implications – The study intends to contribute to laying the ground for developing
adequately targeted and multi-faceted (online) information campaigns to inform about
environmentally friendly living.
Originality/value – The results can contribute to expand understanding of environmentally
friendly living as it is represented online and thereby add value to comprehend and target parts of
society. This paper contributes to the area of environmental information, which is an important and
topical yet under-researched area in information studies. The IssueCrawler tool is used in a concrete
empirical study in information studies.
Keywords Blogs, Mixed methods,Environmental information,IssueCrawler
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
This paper explores the construction and configuration of environmentally friendly
living or green living through making visible the link networks that surround personal
green living blogs. It aims to reveal the most salient issues that contribute to
constituting practices of environmentally friendly everyday living in late modern
consumer societies as well as to determine which actors – i.e. non-profit or interest
organisations, journals, online shops, political parties and others – are brought in to
legitimise these practices and issues online. The results from this research can
contribute to filling a gap in the understanding of environmentally friendly living as it
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
OIR
38,2
248
Received 31 March 2013
Second revision approved
28 May 2013
Online Information Review
Vol. 38 No. 2, 2014
pp. 248-264
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-03-2013-0052
is represented online and thereby add value by understanding and targeting parts of
society.
The starting point is how green living is written about online and constructed
through links and what is considered to be part of green living in this context.
Throughout the paper green living and environmentally friendly living are used
synonymously. Neither term is used in a normative way, but is rather investigated in
relation to how it is understood in the material studied. That said, by focusing on
personal blogs the paper deliberately draws the attention to notions of green living, as
it is constituted through certain everyday life practices and topics, in a western
consumer society. This focus is united with an interest in how issues are shaped online
through the link networks in which they are positioned.
Personal blogs often centre on everyday life and self-presentation in the form of
personal and family affairs (Bronstein, 2013; Herring et al., 2007; Wei, 2009). Personal
green living blogs, i.e. blogs that offer everyday life perspectives on what it means to
live in an environmentally friendly manner, are no different in this regard and many of
them could also be described as lifestyle blogs. A considerable share of their content is
devoted to consumer goods, such as clothes, beauty products and not least children and
children’s clothes and merchandise. They thus manage to amalgamate personal
stories, environmental information, news and product reviews. At the same time,
personal green living blogs often outline efforts of attempts to change certain lifestyles
and to adjust to a way of living that is considered more environmentally friendly and
with less negative environmental impact. Different issues and actors relate to different
ways of doing green living and the reasons behind such practices vary accordingly.
This can take various shapes and it is done for a variety of reasons. These include
improving the quality of life, improving or maintaining one’s own and one’s family’s
health, living up to an image of how a way of living, often as a way of
consuming/non-consuming, should be enacted, or also a vague feeling of responsibility
for the future. Most often reasons are shifting and lie somewhere on a scale between
these points, reaching from a strong focus on the self and one’s family to a concern for
others, the environment more generally and society at large (cf. Haider, 2012).
Environmentally friendly living has often been studied in terms of how to enable
lifestyle and behaviour change (cf. Shove, 2005). More recently the focus in research
has moved to the importance of social practices organising everyday life for
understanding such behaviours (e.g. Hargreaves, 2011; Shove et al., 2012; Shove, 2012 ).
Choices regarding environmentally friendly living and the practices surrounding and
making them possible are in the present paper framed as a type of life politics
(Giddens, 1991) similar to those practices often described in terms of “lifestyle politics”
(Bennett, 1998), “ethical consumption” (cf. Lewis and Potter, 2011), “political
consumerism” (e.g. Micheletti et al., 2006) or “individualised collective action”
(Micheletti, 2003). These notions describe different aspects of the multi-faceted ways in
which political and civic engagement is woven into the texture of everyday private life,
in the form of minor decisions, choices, and seemingly mundane activities. In the case
of green living this could be in the form of recycling, not buying out-of season or
non-organic produce, choosing vegetarian options, not travelling by plane and so forth.
The role of information in achieving change is a complex one and information does not
automatically translate into change. It has been found that what people know about the
environment and about the likely consequences of certain actions does not necessarily
Taking the
environment
online
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