BA, MA (India), MA (England)
Dissertation: Calculating Hope: How Climate Organisers Negotiate Contradictory Engagement Metrics on Digital Platforms
Examining Committee:
Anne Pasek (Supervisor), Stephanie Rutherford, Christopher Cwynar
External Examiner: Shirley Roburn, York University
Internal Examiner: Joshua Synenko
Chair: Martin Arnold
Abstract
In a society increasingly quantified and categorised as data, efforts of climate activists to democratise participation in the climate movement are also subject to algorithmic control. Consequently, a large community of digital climate organisers routinely works with limited resources on digital platforms for wider reach and visibility, which are in turn controlled by few quantified engagement metrics, i.e., likes and shares. This dissertation studies the relationship between these metrics and digital climate organisers in Canada and India to provide a transnational, sociotechnical, and relational understanding of the implications of this quantification of participatory practices in the climate movement. It brings together climate activists from Canada and India to propose an alternative process for reframing digital engagement by including unmeasurable but valuable forms of qualitative engagement in digital organising strategies.
Rooted in interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological frameworks of science and technology studies, this dissertation effectively examines the challenges of unequal formations of power represented by the sociotechnical relationship between digital climate organisers and engagement metrics. The enquiries that follow establish a “duality of engagement metrics,” i.e., the simultaneous position of engagement metrics as valid participatory actions and representatives of power, as a unique feature of the relationship between metrics and climate organisers. This duality of metrics is then located in the platformization of climate action through a novel analysis of digital action toolkits and the resultant standardisation of digital strategies in the climate movement. Subsequently, participatory studies involving climate organisers from Canada and India, help uncover their complex, contradictory, and affective relationship with engagement metrics, shaped by asymmetries of regional politics and organisational structures.
An alternative process for a qualitative reframing of digital engagement emanates from these participatory exchanges. It centres situated and experiential knowledge of digital climate organisers. Such socially-rooted experimentations are required at a time when age of rule-by-metrics may find its fullest form in AI for digital organising. As we grapple with the realities of an increasingly dead, human-less internet, we can look towards such approaches to imagine alternatives that are situated in people and communities and rebuild socially meaningful connections through technology.