Session Chair: Rachel Wood
Presentation 1
My Product, Your Green Choice: exploring the interplay between influencer’s sustainability communication and green marketing strategies on TikTok
Mael Bombaci, Francesco Nespoli
Università Lumsa, Italy
This paper examines the role of TikTok as a platform for communicating sustainability, focusing on the interplay between corporate green marketing practices and green influencers activity as sustainability advocacy. Considering the increasing need for companies to convey their environmental commitment in an authentic manner to raise consumer awareness, TikTok emerges as an effective channel due to its distinctive communicative style. After analysing the theoretical framework of the topic, we examined the actors and practices involved in this form of communication. Specifically, we investigated recurring narratives in collaboration between companies and green influencers through a thematic analysis of 45 videos published in 2023.
Preliminary results indicate the participation of companies from various sectors, highlighting the versatility of this form of communication. Green influencers, backed by scientific evidence, showcase the platform's ability to effectively communicate sustainability, balancing entertainment and informative content. The videos emphasise a narrative that provides information on environmental issues, with the sponsored product presented as a potential solution to the problem. This demonstrates how company sponsorships are integrated into a broader narrative involving third-party actors. In conclusion, while TikTok is seen by green influencers as a powerful tool to address environmental issues, brands seem to be integrating green marketing strategies into the logic of the platform to communicate effectively and entertainingly. This integration is pursued by leveraging the product as a solution to environmental issues, thus avoiding the risk of being accused of greenwashing, and finding convergence in goals with the search for credibility by green influencers.
Presentation 2
REUSE OF IT EQUIPMENT FOR SOCIAL GOOD
Jeanette D'Arcy(1), Rebecca Harris(1), Emma Stone(2)
1: University of Liverpool, United Kingdom; 2: Good Things Foundation
As our societies become increasingly mediated by digital technologies and more essential services and life opportunities move online, it is vital to acknowledge that digital inequalities are still a key issue in the UK. Digital inclusion encompasses more than just access to the devices and data necessary to go online in the first place, including the need for the digital skills, motivation, and understanding to use the internet safely and confidently. However, this first step – i.e. access to devices and data - is still a barrier to inclusion for many. Digital exclusion is intertwined with social and economic inequalities and affordability of devices and data is a key issue, especially in the current cost-of-living crisis. Concern is also growing amid the parallel climate crisis about e-waste and the environmental costs of linear models of consumption of devices, connectivity and digital technologies. Device donation and reuse programmes have the potential to address both the goal of reducing e-waste and of addressing digital inequalities, and there is opportunity in the public sector to achieve these goals both via policy and via leading by example through taking part in such programmes.
This paper presents key findings from a project which, based on a series of interviews with key UK public sector organisations, explored the motivations, enablers, and barriers experienced in determining whether to adopt a more circular approach in how they manage their IT estate, and how this can help them to play their part in improving the lives of digitally excluded people.
Presentation 3
Data Landfills: re-interpreting our understanding of data centre expansion and pollution within post-colonial Ireland
Dylan Murphy
University College Dublin, Ireland
The digitalisation of social relations has been precipitated by the mass collection, creation and storage of data through bulking physical infrastructure known as data centres. Data centres and their expansion are as much a certainty in the public imagination as the growth of grass. However, these centres, often obfuscated in their existence by the very terminology used to describe and naturalise their positionality and function, such as “silicon forest”, expose critical fault lines in the localities burdened by their resource-intensive nature, such as post-colonial Ireland. Their very existence in these localities poses the question of what utility they provide, how much of the data within these centres actually serves a daily function, and how much is simply sitting dormant, never to be retrieved again. In conversation with critical discard studies, critical data studies and with a decolonial lens, this research will conceptualise “Data Landfills” as the inevitable consequence of the era of systematic datafication. This paper aims to open a modern-day black box by interpreting and classifying the wasteful industrial practices behind the data that resides within the data centre nexus of post-colonial Ireland and its contemporary developmental landscape. In doing so, this paper challenges the logic of growth that underlies data centre expansion in the face of an unfolding climate and biodiversity crisis. Data landfills provides an alternative framing of data centres’ purported function, re-contextualising our understanding of the utility of data centres by uniquely positioning their data-driven processes in the realm of pollution and waste economies.
