Media and power in times of hegemonic crisis: exploring contentious climate politics on Twitter

ABSTRACT

During moments of hegemonic crisis, it is crucial to understand the dynamics of media power. This article identifies key structural forces and disruptive tendencies that are factors in a current crisis of the neoliberal hegemonic order. This intellectual background underpins an empirical analysis of Twitter data collected during the UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland (COP26). We identify large attention clusters around established political actors and their counter-hegemonic challengers; concluding that during these intense global political events a hegemonic crisis produces spaces where systemically marginalized actors can harness relational attention power and mobilize it toward distinct political purposes.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• hegemony
• social networks
• climate politics
• COP26

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For in-depth background on this critique, see Pooley (2006).

2. For more on our methodology, see Kunelius et al. (2022): https://www.helsinki.fi/en/helsinki-institute-social-sciences-and-humanities/work-progress. The report includes access to tables that provide summaries of the top user accounts and retweeted content for each of the eight largest communities in the COP26 retweet network.

3. English-language keywords were chosen due to our focus on a large-scale, international event where English is the shared language spoken in the official proceedings.

4. Louvain modularity is a standard clustering algorithm used in social network analysis, including recent efforts to study climate change communication on Twitter (Williams et al. 2015, Mahl et al. 2021). For an overview of how the Louvain modularity algorithm detects community structures within large networks, see de Meo et al. (2011).

5. For an introduction to the ForceAtlas2 layout algorithm, see Jacomy et al. (2014).

6. This shift to a more granular analysis of the dynamics of relational power underscores our basic commitment to ultimately viewing different ways of conceptualizing social power as complementary rather than as competing visions about what power ‘really’ means (see, e.g. Heiskala 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation and the Strategic Research Council (SRC) established within the Academy of Finland [352557].

Notes on contributors

Matthew Tegelberg

Matthew Tegelberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University, Canada. His research explores the interplay between media, technology, environments and climate change/justice.

Risto Kunelius

Risto Kunelius is the Director of Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences (HSSH) and a Professor of Media and Communications. He specializes in research on the relationship between the media and politics, as well as communication related to climate change.

Matti Pohjonen

Matti Pohjonen is a University Researcher in HSSH’s methodological unit. He works at the intersection of digital anthropology, philosophy and digital methods, developing research approaches for understanding digital cultures and digital politics in a comparative global context.