Climate irresponsibility on social media. A critical approach to “high-carbon visibility discourse”

ABSTRACT Human GHG emissions are entering networked everyday relations. On social media, users potentially “reveal” their carbon footprints when they post pictures of a beef-based dinner or intercontinental travel. As the increasing urgency of climate change coincides with people's increasingly online-oriented lifestyles, we suggest that social-media research should devote attention to the ways in which users overlook, hide, limit, or casually articulate their high-carbon oriented lifestyles in digital space. This would contribute important knowledge about the role of social-media communication concerning climate change as an individual responsibility, and requires a concentration on how status updates become loaded with ideological meaning (high-carbon visibility discourse). The purpose is to present a framework for critical analyses of visual disclosure of carbon footprints in social media use. Media theory, semiotics, network theory and critical theory are combined to theorize how users’ activities on social media become high-carbon oriented; their promotion of a business-as-usual stance; and how this operates ideologically through reification, legitimation and unification.


Introduction
Climate change, its mitigation, and adaptation in relation to it, cannot be understood separately from the role of communication; for example, film and other popular-culture products, mass media (e.g.Boykoff 2012) and various journalistic materials contribute to or detract from the public understanding of the issue (e.g.Berglez 2011;Appelgren and Jönsson 2020).As society's media ecology is increasingly associated with social media platforms (Anderson 2014), more and more scholars have turned their attention to the role of such platforms as Twitter, Facebook, Weibo and Instagram.
So far, research on climate change and use of social media by individuals has primarily focused on how users share information about and comment on general (Connor et al. 2016;Veltri and Atanasova 2017;Liu and Zhao 2017) and scientific (Yeo et al. 2017;Olausson 2018Olausson , 2019) aspects of climate change; on the extent of their political engagement (Anderson and Huntington 2017;Thorson and Wang 2019); and on the connection between global warming and extreme events (Al-Saqaf and Berglez 2019;Berglez and Al-Saqaf 2021).However, discussion of climate change on social media is no longer limited to public debates and comments on the scientific certainty of IPCC reports, macro-politics (the Paris Agreement, etc.), the explanation of extreme heatwaves, or the climate impact of livestock production (Olausson 2018(Olausson , 2019)), but has also come to involve people's personal habits and lifestyle decisions in a more micro-oriented and intrusive sense.In this regard, previous research contributions have not focused very much on how climate change interferes with digital networked communication, and how it thereby becomes intertwined with the "digital traces of the everyday" (Bruns and Moon 2019, 12).
This can be illustrated by an event from early 2019, when a Swedish Instagram account, "AningslösaInfluencers" (CluelessInfluencers), quickly gained many followers and attracted major media attention.The purpose of the account was to criticize the unsustainable and climate-unfriendly lifestyles of social media personalities and influencers (Enke and Borchers 2019).The anonymous digital activists behind the account continually published material taken from various influencers' social media accounts, exposing such things as their long-distance air travel, and adding information about the trips' expected CO 2 emissions.Some influencers heeded the criticism, such as the Swedish-American media personality Penny Parnevik, with more than 200,000 followers on Instagram, who considered the activism an important "wake-up call." 1 Others went on the counterattack, refusing to be "climate shamed." This controversial social media event suggested that climate change cannot be mitigated by a few powerful institutions and actors alone, but must also be tackled by individual people, who have the ethical and political responsibility to reduce their GHG emissions through their everyday life choices.Scholars of political economy such as Swyngedouw (2010), Kenis and Lievens (2015) and Pepermans and Maeseele (2016) correctly point out that a moralizing approach that overly emphasizes individuals' personal responsibility for the climate is potentially problematic, because it runs the risk of counteracting or delaying more structural criticism of market capitalism and the responsibility of macro actors.Nevertheless, the fossil fuel industry and any single person's daily transportation, trash-sorting habits and consumption routines, are both important for the climate.Without the latter, and the local and personal awareness that it generates of what climate change is about, it seems unlikely that much-needed global climate policies and legislation will be able to obtain legitimacy in society.
While this is a well-known discussion (Berglez, Höijer, and Olausson 2009;Dahl 2014), the present article takes it a step further, starting from the observation that the topic of individual responsibility for climate change seems to be becoming ever-more prominent in the context of digital communication.The targets of the now de-activated Instagram project AningslösaInfluencers were elite persons in the social media influencer sector.But, on social media, the phenomenon of eco-guilt (Moore and Yang 2020) increasingly involves people in general, including you and me.In many different social contexts, also when communicating digitally, an individual might reflect upon and develop a climate self.Am I a large emitter or not?In this way, there is a potential acceleration of the individualization of climate change and the ensuing cultural "shaming" mechanisms, which are connected to a new level of visibility of climate change that is flourishing in our increasingly networked society (Castells 2009).The everyday use of digital devices such as smart phones potentially "does" something to individuals' relation to climate change, in so far as the sharing of information on social media platforms about everyday life (eating, driving, producing, practicing, etc.) might signal carbon footprints, and be drawn into the debate on mitigating climate change.
The crucial question is whether users de facto respond to the climate-change problem in their digital interaction with others or instead repress it and allow life to go on as normal (business-as-usual).This article focuses on the latter option.To yield knowledge about the collective and sociocultural processes that sustain a "fossil-based" ideology, this article directs analytical attention to routine social-media practices, and the ways ordinary users overlook, hide, limit, or casually articulate their "high-carbon" oriented lifestyles in digital space.This would contribute important knowledge about more or less taken-forgranted and naturalized assumptions about climate change as an individual responsibility, and requires a concentration on how status updates that were previously considered banal, innocent and neutral instead become loaded with ideological symbolism.Thus, in this theoretical article, we suggest a critical approach in which ordinary people's disclosure of their carbon footprints on social media are analyzed and treated as a potential problem.We conceptualize these disclosures as a form of meaning-makinghigh-carbon visibility discoursewith undesirable sociocultural consequences (Van Dijk 1998).Although this topic is universally and globally relevant, from the perspective of climate justice it is above all important for large-emitter countries and/or members of those classes (middle/upper-middle class and up) that cause most of the emissions globally.

Towards a critical theoretical approach for analyzing high-carbon visibility discourse
The purpose of this theoretical article is to develop a framework for the critical analysis of visual disclosure of carbon footprints in the context of everyday use of social media.It is argued that this requires an analytical combination of three expanding processes in the interface between language and material reality.Below, media theory, semiotics, network theory and critical theory are dynamically combined to present the (1) symbolic, (2) digital, and (3) ideological expansions of the climate issue.We suggest that the first two pave the way for the third, and focus on the prevalence of business-as-usual communication and its repression of the climate change problem.
(1) Our point of departure is the assumption that the growth of "carbon knowledge" (Kent and Hannay 2020;Whitmarsh, Seyfang, and O'Neill 2011)  (3) The status updates thereby also come to be permeated with ideological meaning, i.e. the signaling of underlying norms and values, which might stimulate users to negotiate or question high-carbon oriented lifestyles, but also and not least contributes to reproduction of the status quo (Malm 2016).We suggest that the carefree (or perhaps "shame free") reproduction of fossil-friendly business-as-usual ideology in everyday social-media communication can be understood in terms of "climate irresponsibility."Guided by Thompson's critical theoretical work (1990), we argue that the business-asusual ideology primarily involves processes of reification (users disconnecting their use of social media from the problem of climate change); legitimization (users interactively seeking support and understanding for their footprints) and unification (users' actual or potential climate selves being outcompeted by collective identification process, e.g. the male collective, national identity, e-shoppers, etc.).
In the concluding section of the article, challenges concerning the critical approach and empirical research are discussed and problematized.

The symbolic expansion of climate change (the visualization of consequences, solutions and causes in society)
First, attention is given to the expanding visibility of climate change, as well as of the climate issue as such, including the different human responses to global warming.To begin with, this has to do with the general propagation in society of a visual culture (Thompson 2005) where images, photographs, animations, maps, graphics, etc. enjoy increasing importance and dominance.This culture is built on a "visibility discourse" (Midberry, Comfort, and Roskos 2020) involving internal relationships between visual artifacts and oral/written language.Photographs, for example, are inevitably interwoven with language (Machin 2007, 21), as the socially constructed "meaning" of the visual artifact presupposes oral and written language, while the use of metaphors in language helps to make phenomena "visible" in our minds, and so forth.In socio-linguistic studies of the interplay between images and oral/written language (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001) it is essential to adopt a multimodal approach to communication, i.e. one that pays heed to how combinations of different modes of communication contribute to meaning-making as well as to making something "visible." In this respect, climate change has traditionally been associated with distant, abstract, and thus invisible processes.Climate scientists tend to emphasize that we cannot "see" climate change as such.Global warming is likely to generate more frequent heatwaves, for example, but that does not mean that observing an ongoing heatwave in, say, southern Sweden, is an empirically valid way to observe the consequences of climate change.Thus, in scientific discourse, climate change is represented through statistical models and data (Rudiak-Gould 2013;Hulme 2014Hulme , 2017;;Janković and Schultz 2017), for example, in terms of measurements of average global temperature over time, or of the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, rather than visible events.Following the socio-psychological theory of Serge Moscovici (2001), there is still an inherent desire in culture to transform climate change, like other abstract phenomena, into something concrete and highly visible (cf. Doyle 2007;Fox 2014;Berglez and Olausson 2014).For the sake of promoting further public engagement with the topic, certain institutions in society, not least the popular culture industry, the conservation movements, and the media (Anderson 2014;Berglez 2011), are making efforts to ground climate change in established cognitive and discursive categories of communication.Climate change is understood and explained in terms of familiar phenomena with which it can be linked, such as "mountains," "oceans," "animals," "shorelines," and so on, thereby making it more visible (Moscovici 2001;Olausson and Uggla 2021).Not least when it comes to negative or catastrophic impacts of climate change, in media culture in the last decade (cf.O'Neill 2019), a few particular visual representations of it have been frequently circulated and reused (Anderson 2014), including photos of suffering polar bears, melting glaciers and dying coral reefs.
However, there is increasing diversity in ways of visually representing climate change, which is explained by the growth of sustainability-oriented knowledge production deriving from experts, businesspeople, innovators, journalists, activists, etc.As a consequence, climate change increasingly "frames the way ordinary people 'imagine their surroundings' " (Kunelius and Eide 2012, 267), such that social reality is observed and interpreted through a "climate change filter" (Beckman 2019).
Part of this process consists of innovative ways to mitigate GHG emissions (Culloty et al. 2019, 186).Increasingly, (visible) phenomena in social reality tend to connote climate change, and thereby become associated with it, due to their status as potential solutions.Among some groups, merely observing recycling bins, a vegan burger, a solar panel system, an electric car or bicycle, or machines that suck CO 2 out of the air, could generate thinking about climate change.
Furthermore, visual representations of anthropogenic causes of climate change, which are a key area of interest in this contribution, have usually been connected to systemic processes such as industrial production.Classic icons of this are chimneys and smokestacks (Olausson 2010;O'Neill 2019, 10), which connote the fossil fuel industry.As knowledge about anthropogenic climate change has advanced, it has become progressively more multifaceted and micro-oriented, with an increasing focus on the role of the individual (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) and everyday life.Knowledge about what primarily generates GHG emissions among individuals is partly changing, and is a contested field, but emissions have primarily been linked to transportation, food and consumption (Dahl 2014;Olausson 2018Olausson , 2020)).From this research, we know that "individualized" climate change becomes connected with objects such as cars, shopping bags, plastic cans, and restaurant menus; practices, including eating, using, driving, and producing; and different spatial contexts such as restaurants, kitchens, store shelves, malls, hotel resorts, and four-lane highways.Semiotically speaking, these are all associations, reminders, signs, or traces of everyday, anthropogenic micro-causes of climate change.They are ways of imagining or concretely observing the problem of carbon footprints at the individual level (Table 1): The digital-networked expansion of climate change (how individuals' mitigation of climate change and use of social media converge) Here, we argue that the symbolic expansion of climate change is dialectically intertwined with a similar expansion in the field of digital-networked relations.The vital point is that the aforementioned climate-relevant objects (cars, etc.), practices (consuming, etc.) and spaces (kitchens, etc.) (see Table 1) cut to the heart of everyday life. 2 In so doing, they also are central motifs when communicating on social media platforms.To explain how human GHG emissions overlap with social media communication, we provide some illustrative examples.Air travel is perhaps the most obvious example, including the use of hashtags such as #offwego, which signal cosmopolitan mobility and elite identity (Example 1).Another prominent example of high-carbon visibility discourse is the publishing of images of food or cooking skills, not seldom involving meat consumption (Example 2): The photograph of the airport, together with the text about the imminent departure to Singapore as well as the meat-based meal, potentially makes anthropogenic climate change visible through connotative meaning-making.Arguably, the more deeply that knowledge about climate change and "carbon capability" (Whitmarsh, Seyfang, and O'Neill 2011) take root in society, the more likely it is that this potential will be actualized.Thus, formerly more or less neutral objects, spaces, and practices are increasingly being viewed and visualized through a "climate filter."Castells (2009) and other network theorists (Cardoso 2012;Papacharissi 2011, etc.) have demonstrated how digital technology and social media in many ways have brought about a revolution in cultural visibility, going beyond the television era (Thompson 1995(Thompson , 2000(Thompson , 2005)).In this transformation, not only public figures and members of the elite but also ordinary users become occupied with a frontstage-backstage rationale (Goffman 1959) and the curating of an ideal image by providing their networks/audiences with a combination of public and private information (Hogan 2010;Tolson 2010;Berglez 2018;Schwartz and Halegoua 2015).In this respect, the high-carbon visibility discourse, i.e. the disclosure on social media of objects, spaces, and practices involving high-carbon impacts, is countered by the climate-friendly self-promoting culture, which instead is characterized by users' construction of a "low-carbon self."This self is constructed through an emphasis on sustainable, green and renewable ways of living.Moreover, it is also possible to imagine digital self-presentations that strike a compromise between high-carbon and low-carbon positions, i.e. status updates that generate carbon-neutral visibility discourse.This could take the form of single updates such as "I have decided to sponsor a tree planting project in Kenya," or be done over a period of time by achieving a proper balance between "high-carbon" and "low-carbon" status updates (Table 2).It is plausible that greater awareness about individual carbon footprints, which might vary from country to country, lead to ever-more advanced strategies and tactics (de Certau 1984) of self-promotion as well as anxious attempts to deal with climate change in digitalnetworked relations.Though it remains to be empirically tested, it is our assumption that while some "practice what they preach" and demonstrate this with great satisfaction on their social media platforms, others struggle with what they themselves experience as disadvantageous backstage aspects of their identity, such as "embarrassing" footprints.Due to social pressure (Moore and Yang 2020) to "do the right thing" among certain groups, "hiding" practices could to an increasing extent be on the way, e.g.being reluctant to publish photographs, texts and comments which could display extensive GHG emissions. 3  The ideological expansion of climate change in the context of social media use Finally, it is our intention to argue that the symbolic and digital-networked expansion of climate change also leads to an expansion of climate change as an ideological issue on social media, where not least values and norms signaling a business-as-usual stance are brought to the fore.Although there are instances of green and climate-friendly communication on social media platforms that can serve as examples of how to handle the topic in digital interaction with others, it is questionable whether they have managed to challenge the dominance of high-carbon visibility discourse.Despite the difficulty of empirically capturing users' intentions and meaning-making on social media, we suggest that a task for critical studies is to develop knowledge about how this kind of discourse operates through social interaction (Malm 2016;cf. Zizek 1989).
To begin with, the production of business-as -usual ideology could be rather obvious and intentional.Think of visual discourse on social media which, far from concealing beef consumption or long-distance air travel, instead articulates jouissance in them, e.g."I love-airports," "I love meat," "I like hot summers," or "Fuck Greta" hashtags, expressing tactical and/or uncivil refusal to adapt to the idea that individuals are responsible for mitigating emissions, or even resistance to the climate issue as a whole.Likewise, the constant exchange of social-media driven texts and photos, spreading the message: "I still buy these kinds of things," "I still make these kinds of trips," constructs a way of repressing climate shame.Such instances of resistance and repression notwithstanding, we argue that socio-cultural reactions against the mitigation of climate change are in most cases a matter of more subtle, unintentional and under-the-radar ideological processes of great interest to the critically oriented scholar.These involve how users communicating high-carbon visibility discourses from airports, beaches, restaurants, etc., and their benevolent friends/followers who accept and promote the status updates, may or perhaps may not know or be very concerned about "what they are doing" (Zizek 1994, 305), due to limited knowledge about climate change and the role of the individual.This might be understandable, given the different levels of climate knowledge in different parts of the world, but it still remains a socio-cultural problem.
As a point of departure, we suggest that the analysis of high-carbon visibility discourse is guided by the three types of ideology production (Thompson 1990) presented in Table 3.The production of business-as-usual ideology is viewed as involving complex relations between encoding and decoding processes (Hall 1996) in which producers and recipients (followers/friends) jointly maintain the status quo.
Reification: producing and "seeing" isolated phenomena rather than processes György Lukács's (1971) seminal Marxian development of the concept of reification originally demonstrated how the capitalist system and its inherent exploitation of workers and their labor are inscribed in the very form of the commodity.The complex relations of capitalist production and its constant movement are repressed and made invisible in the everyday context of production and consumption.Before us, we see only a commodity (a mobile phone, a bunch of bananas, a pair of jeans, etc.), not unjust relations between those who own the means of production and those who do not, which thus are embedded and hidden in the commodity.
The idea of reification has proved to be useful for understanding many different aspects of modern societyincluding our relation to climate change and the particular case of high-carbon visibility discourse (Malm 2018, 13).Hence, despite growing climate knowledge, visual representations on social media continue to swish by as seemingly isolated phenomena, as if they were somehow "outside" climate change.More precisely, reification occurs when, in the production and reception of social-media status updates about objects (cars, etc.), practices (eating, etc.) and spaces (malls, etc.), users primarily or exclusively produce and "see" objects, practices and spaces, and thereby disconnect them from their much wider ramifications.
Table 3.Three types of ideology production.

Reification
Legitimation Unification High-carbon visibility discourse (objects, practices and spaces) presented and appearing as isolated phenomena rather than processes High-carbon visibility discourse (objects, practices and spaces) as interactive "approval" rituals High-carbon visibility discourse (objects, practices and spaces) as embedded in cultural and national identification processes and rituals Consequently, one could ask, for example: What do producers or recipients of holiday status updates primarily "see"the beautiful Maldivian beach in a photo, or the CO 2 practices that enabled the photo to be taken in the first place (unsustainable tourism)?Do we see the expensive car, or the purchased gift that has been transported between continents, only as objects and not also as environmental relations?What makes reification an efficient promoter of high-carbon ideology is that the appearance of the object, space and practice as isolated phenomena is so cognitively forceful despite our potential knowledge about the problem.Reification in this context is thus not necessarily a case of ideology in terms of "false consciousness," but rather an everyday psychological repression of what we might intellectually know: "Yes, I know that climate change is prevalent in my everyday life, except in my innocent micro-moments of sharing or liking status updates … " Legitimization: digital-visual forms of self-rewards The second ideological process, legitimization, is connected to consumer society's (Hearn 2008) motto of self-rewarding practices.This could be exemplified with the universalization of L'Oréal's classic advert "Because I'm worth it!"from 1971.This catchphrase has been reused and refined by other brands over the years, emphasizing that because life can be tough, boring, depressing, exhausting, etc., we all deserve to be compensated with some type of pleasure.Legitimizing this or that highcarbon "act" then becomes a form of (digital) narrativization of everyday life events that " … treat the present as part of a timeless and cherished tradition" (Thompson 1990, 60).When combining a cherishing of tradition in the spirit of this is how things have always been done with the rationale of timelessness (there is only here and now, and no tomorrow) one is free to set aside the magnitude of climate change and temporarily suspend the downsides of the actone's own carbon footprints.This also becomes an expression of the particular contexts or moments when one's weakness or desire for X becomes stronger than anything else.
Legitimization is particularly prominent in the well-established social-media ritual (Abel, Machin, and Brownlow 2020) where users lend approval to each other's personal desires.In the social displaying of a trip to this or that destination, the purchase of this or that commodity, and so forth, producers of status updates justify their lifestyle to their assumedly understanding followers/friends or are fishing for emotional or rational support for it.High-carbon visibility discourse thus becomes legitimized in terms of an "of course you're worth it" rationale involving likes, smileys, and encouraging comments.What makes such acts of legitimization a strong (re)producer of a business-as-usual stance on climate change is the social pressure of upholding a friendly conversational tone among networked friends.Hence, when it comes to receivers' observations of highcarbon visibility discourses on such platforms as Facebook or Instagram, it is quite hard to break potential "elephant-in-the room" situations and disturb the cozy atmosphere with a critical remark.Nonetheless, conflicting attitudes and values might intersect as well as clash in the comment fields.Status updates about long-distance travel, for example, can give rise to obstinate or humorous statements, such as a friendly "Have fun in Singapore, but make sure to climate compensate for the long-distance trip :-)" but also to openly antagonistic discourse, particularly in public feeds (Olausson 2018;2020).
Unification: high-carbon visibility discourse through ingroup identification High-carbon visibility discourse is also articulated through, and because of, collective identification processes.This occurs when social-media postings involving transportation, food and consumption, and their different practices, use of spaces, and desire for objects, become embedded in the spirit of a collective "We who buy, enter, build, eat, etc. X."For example, selfies or group selfies characterized by high-carbon oriented visual representations from shopping malls, beaches, vehicles, etc., function as symbols of unity -"this is what I along with many others do"making it difficult, less relevant, or inconceivable to break with them.
Unification of this kind could be connected to class, gender, and/or demographic belonging (urban/rural). 4 For example, studies have shown how disinterest in the climate issue as well as climate denial are connected to masculinity and traditional masculine roles (Hultman 2020), and that high-carbon habits (overconsumption, SUVs, long-distance flying, etc.) to a great extent emanate from the middle class/upper middle-class (Lange and Meyer 2009).
However, the kind of unity that is most effective for the reproduction of a business-asusual rationale is that which manages to bring together " … individuals in a collective identity, irrespective of the differences and divisions that may separate them" (Thompson 1990, 64).Consequently, the status quo could be jointly reinforced by individual users across identities and group belongings, including both those who never care about climate change and those who often do care but perhaps make exceptions to their fossil-free ambitions.Such exceptions could be explained by the importance of a selfpresentation on social media that outcompetes one's potential climate self; the ritual, habit, desire or peer pressure to symbolically present oneself as a member of the economically strong, upper-middle-class, traditionally male, national, cultural ingroup takes precedenceat least momentarilyover one's potential climate self.This means that one might both agree with A ("climate change is a bad thing and I do have a responsibility to reduce my CO 2 emissions as an individual and also to communicate this message in my network") and generate B (high-carbon visibility discourse) due to one's parallel identification with this or that group.
Returning to the case of Sweden, the numerous (Swedish) postings about (unsustainable) long-distance tourism to Thailand (a very popular holiday destination among Swedish citizens) are an illustrative example of the power of national identity in the reproduction of business-as-usual ideology.These postings give rise to ritualistic status updates from Stockholm Arlanda Airport and other Swedish airports before boarding airplanes, and geotagging practices (Schwartz and Halegoua 2015) in terms of "checking in" to hotel resorts, which might also be viewed as social-media driven articulations of national belonging, i.e. articulations of rather typically Swedish things to do, that do not argue against the need for climate change mitigation but still uphold the status quo.

Concluding comments and research proposals
As perhaps the greatest challenge to humanity, climate change is a relevant topic for many scholars, including social media researchers (Schäfer et al. 2016).In this article, our intention has been to outline a critical approach to studying representations of high-carbon activities on social media platforms, and to highlight the challenges of analyzing the reproduction of business-as-usual ideology in users' everyday communication.Obviously, the proposed approach must be tested in empirical research and adjusted thereafter.Such empirical studies could then also be further connected to a larger development in society referred to as onlife (Bechmann, Sandvik, and Zelano 2019;cf. Bruns and Moon 2019): Onlife designates the transformational reality that, in contemporary developed countries, our offline and online experiences and lives are inextricably interwoven.Our onlives produce digital traces or footprints, some of which are even produced before birth by our parents and continue to exist after our death (in the shape of registers, bank accounts, social media profiles, etc.).(Bechmann, Sandvik, and Zelano 2019, 4) Most research contributions about onlife are likely to contribute to an important and necessary critique of this development, for example, by pointing to the risks and problems with increasing Internet surveillance in society.But, in the case of climate-change mitigation and the role of the individual, onlife culture could also spur the aforementioned "doing the right thing" kinds of habits.What is meant here is thus "political correctness" in a positive sense, in which the individual is not forced to become more "sustainable" but is potentially nudged in this direction through digital-networked interpersonal interaction, according to his or her capacity.(Not everyone can afford a Tesla car, and so forth.)Even if political correctness has come to be associated with negative characteristics and in some circles is mocked (being associated with lack of authenticity, insincerity, hiding one's true self, peer-pressure, cultural repression), one should not underestimate its progressive power.One of the key aims of the anti-smoking campaigns of the 1980s, for example, was to make it less appropriate, cool, acceptable, etc. to display oneself with a cigarette in one's mouth, which in turn helped to reduce smoking in different groups (cf.Rosenberg 2011).
Hence, the more that high-carbon oriented spaces, practices and objects become undesirable, the more prone we will become as individuals to reduce our carbon footprints.This calls for more detailed studies of social-media controversies and antagonisms in which high-carbon visibility updates are explicitly questioned, in a way quite similar to the goal of AningslösaInfluencers.There is also need for more in-depth studies of the outcomes of such controversies (further polarization, constructive deliberation, consent, behavioral changes, etc.) as well as for big-data oriented examinations of the extent of high-carbon visibility discourse during a regular day on social media platforms, and how its presence in terms of reification, legitimization and unification might turn "climate conscious" forms of communication into rather odd and ideologically charged features of everyday, digital-networked discourse.Last but not least, not only the reproduction of business-as-usual ideology is of empirical interest, but also discursive contests around high-carbon visibility discourse that might point to (embryonic) transformations of this ideology.

Example 1 :
Instagram photograph: picture from a terminal at Munich Airport, Germany.Motif: a row of airplanes, viewed from within the terminal building.Text: Off we go/symbol for airplane/12 h on the plane, then 12 h in Singapore and then … 9 more hours on a plane.Who doesn't love it?#singaporeairlines #flightstart #munichairport #offwego #holidaystart #airportview (Retrieved October 30, 2018) Example 2: Instagram: photograph from a kitchen, zooming in on a piece of red meat on a cutting board.Text: My first self-made bresaola /smiley/ Really nice and tasty./Smiley/ #bresaola #meat #meatlover #meatcoma #food #foodporn #muu.(RetrievedNovember 1, 2018)

Table 1 .
Visual dimensions of individual carbon footprints.

Table 2 .
Three types of climate visibility discourses in relation to space, object and practice.