Meme-ing while the world burns: Climate change news on Reddit and the cultural politics of platform participation

Litherland, Benjamin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3735-354X and Wood, Rachel (2025) Meme-ing while the world burns: Climate change news on Reddit and the cultural politics of platform participation. European Journal of Cultural Studies. ISSN 1367-5494

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Abstract

This article makes a case for the value and urgency of a cultural study’s contextual approach to researching how climate change news events are interpreted by audiences. Research that applies a classically cultural studies ‘bottom-up’ approach to studying climate media audiences in the spaces and contexts where they encounter and negotiate meaning is surprisingly sparse in the scholarship on climate news reception. The article draws on a case study: a qualitative thematic analysis of Reddit discussion threads in which users responded to images and videos of New York City obscured by smoke from Canadian wildfires in June 2023. Analysis of the threads demonstrates how Reddit users drew upon popular culture references to films, television, video games and other media to articulate the strange and shocking nature of the images; expressed a range of ambivalent affective states from detachment to despair, anger and fear, but not hope, and shared knowledge and advice in the humorous, geeky, authentic and authoritative discursive and affective registers valued on the platform. Taking a contextual approach to researching climate media audiences reveals how the social and cultural context in which climate news stories or images are encountered plays a fundamental role in shaping understanding and feeling, and how this comes to underpin the kinds of climate politics and futures that are imagined as possible or impossible.