The next speaker in our panel at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is the great Barbara Pfetsch, whose focus is on the issue spaces represented in these datasets on COP26 and COP27. Climate change is of course a planetary issue, and how it is addressed is linked to the transnationalisation and translocalisation of digital public spheres; such practices show that space is socially constructed, as are perspectives of the geography of responsibility and impact, which leads to a kind of discursive geography. There is a need here, then, to map the attention economy of climate change.
COP meetings serve as focal points in a long-term effort: they are sudden, attention-channelling events which shift public and policy agendas towards a particular issue but can also be used to highlight other, unrelated issues at the same time. This can be explored using the concept of issue spatiality: the collective construction of the space for public issues, also through the very concrete practice of place-naming in conjunction with issues and sub-issues. For COP 26 and 27, this can be analysed in the context of different event agendas, different co-occurring events, and different locations.
This approach to the dataset began by identifying mentions of geographic locations within original tweets in the data; these were extracted via LLM, and assigned latitude and longitude coordinates. The locations of the COP events themselves were of course especially prominent here, but for COP26 other locations especially represented the US, China, India, Australia, Brazil, France, Kenya. The patterns for COP27 were similar.
Key shared themes across the two events included Latin American, European, Australian, and Canadian climate politics; the energy transition and sustainability; water and climate change and global warming; gender equality; event-related issues such as private plane travel to the events, major speeches; and unrelated political agendas. These could then be mapped to geographic spaces.
Regional discourses were especially centred on Latin America; Australia; on climate change mitigation in the Global North; climate impacts on Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctic; and unrelated news and activism about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This demonstrates the translocalisation of these events: the way they are connected to specific locations around the world, for the brief periods of time that they take place. Attention is often less to those countries which are most affected by climate change, but more to those countries that produce the greatest carbon emissions. This shows how the attention economy prompted by these events is utilised by activists and others.
