I wrote this page to debate the positive and negative effects of the process of being sustainable and the climate crisis becoming a trend within social media and the conversation between that. I found doing actual research on the topic helped me feel more informed within this piece of writing and it is important to include it within my blog due to the relevance it has especially with my sub-brand. The piece of writing is shown below.
As the climate crisis becomes more globally recognized, so does the process of acting sustainably. However, the perception surrounding sustainability has morphed into a megatrend engulfing business initiatives, life choices, and social media networks. The positives of the megatrend have shown an increasing benefit within businesses especially, corporate companies needing to change their processes to fit this idea of zero waste, renewable energy, and carbon-negative ideals that have been built up. An example of this circumstance with a business model is the Johnson Financial Group where the company created a sustainability campaign that focused on improving operations while generating social, environmental, and economic success. The results of the sustainability campaign showed that over one year Johnson Financial had reduced energy consumption at its corporate headquarters saving 500,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, and 17,000 therms of natural gas, and eliminated more than one million pounds of carbon dioxide per year. The process of embracing sustainability is similar no matter what industry you are in or the size of your organization. After senior leadership has made the commitment, sustainability needs to be specifically defined for your organization. But when focusing on brands that advertise in a major context some approaches for sustainability shift. One of the most prominent examples of this is greenwashing within advertising which is a marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization’s products, aims, and policies are environmentally friendly when no environmental positive action is taken. An example is Coca-Cola Life. The soft drink was Coca-Cola’s 2013 attempt at an allegedly environmentally friendly and health-conscious product. Made from the same plastic bottles and if not recycled produces the same environmental impact as regular Coca-Cola.
In relevance to the megatrend within social media sustainable living and ‘ranting’ have been placed hand in hand. Social media is a very useful resource when sharing information and learning new things, especially around sustainability however the reliability of the source is often questioned. With the trend gaining more and more recognition among younger generations elements of over-exaggeration and hypocrisy have been shown due to the space of social media being behind a screen. The significance of recognizing the climate crisis and informing yourself about the topic is a grand need for society. However, the misinformation surrounding the topic on social media isn’t recognized as a negative effect on the megatrend of sustainability but what’s needed is making conscious ethical decisions to support sustainable outputs and resources. Through research, I noted the most recent posts surrounding climate change. I looked through Tik Tok, Instagram, and Facebook to shape which demographics are surrounding the most within each social media platform. Some of the sources are surrounding this text, in conclusion within Tik Tok there is a lot of information shared however the content is struck with clickbait surrounding elements that seem upsetting to an outside eye however not informing to the extent needed to cause change but still including credible sustainability actions and informing through recorded new articles. With Instagram following the #climate change chain content, a lot of the posts are a mix match of reliable sources alongside humor and clickbait, I would say 50/50 surrounding this topic. From the posts surrounding climate change, there was a recurring stream of trusted sources whose intent was to inform and share which was really useful. When researching facebook the first thing I noticed was the significantly less scale of posts Facebook has under climate change 462k posts compared to Instagram the hashtags use involved in 6.7m posts. even though the range of posts on different platforms compared to Facebook is large the lack of fake news and greenwashing is promoted there is still involvement of these factors however the scale of it isn’t as promoted.
Ultimately, the result of the widely spread process of being more sustainable and the effects of sharing a global issue via social media can result in it becoming trendy and viral the need for this is crucial but the effects of this process can lead to misinformation and result in unethical process for example greenwashing. It’s a hard debate to confront as the scale and power social media can have is an important factor to face in modern society however is beneficial overall to the cause.