Description
We examine how climate change perspectives on YouTube project two forms of knowledge through perspective: knowledge of human/non-human entanglement and knowledge of nature as object of a scientific gaze. The first perspective de-centers the modernist question of the veracity of climate change narratives to instead identify figures through which alternative perspectives can be presented concerning how humanity and nature are co-implicated and how their interdependencies can be managed (see e.g. Povenelli in 2018 The Feminist Anthropocene). The second perspective makes use of drone and satellite imagery that keeps the modernist, objective gaze as central to establishing scientific truth. The paper analyses how perspectives are bound up in narrative projection (YouTube content) and reception (user comments, focus groups). We also track the role of platform infrastructure in directing content to users: YouTube’s next-up algorithm. Through audience analysis we identify how users bring these perspectives into negotiation with their own. This comparison allows us to explore what other perspectives are absent or silenced, how YouTube’s algorithms enable this, and how users feel other perspectives could and should be made present. The analysis interweaves forms of visual and narrative analysis, social media analytics, and audience research. The authors are a collective of scholars from the social sciences and humanities focused on global insecurities who seek to probe how the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière) and thus the knowable and actionable are configured through global media infrastructure. As the world’s second largest search engine, YouTube is a central to the distribution of climate knowledges.
