Digital Ecocriticism and Environmental Discourse in Social Media: Negotiating Climate Anxiety through Contemporary English Narratives
Keywords:
Digital ecocriticism, climate anxiety, Environmental discourse, social media narratives, English language, Ecological grief, digital humanitiesAbstract
This article examines the intersection of digital ecocriticism and environmental discourse as manifested in social media platforms, focusing on how contemporary English-language narratives function as sites for negotiating climate anxiety. Drawing on ecocritical theory, discourse analysis, and digital humanities methodologies, this study analyzes 2,500 English-language posts collected from Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok between January 2022 and December 2023, supplemented by close reading of 50 extended narratives. Corpus analysis using AntConc software identified dominant metaphorical systems, while critical discourse analysis and genre analysis revealed six primary narrative strategies for processing ecological grief. Findings demonstrate that crisis metaphors dominate Twitter/X (61%), while care and repair metaphors are more prevalent on Instagram (41%), and dark humor achieves the highest engagement on TikTok. The analysis further reveals significant epistemic inequalities, with Global South voices underrepresented relative to their ecological experience. This study proposes a four-dimensional framework for digital ecocriticism platform materiality, algorithmic mediation, affective ecology, and epistemic democracy to guide future analyses of climate communication in social media contexts.
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