Internet memes about climate change deniers are typically seen as harmless. Yet, when understanding the denialist critique of climate science through the lens of social constructivism, a more complex picture emerges. Denialism should not just be understood as an information deficit or a rejection of the scientific method. A more nuanced explanation acknowledges the political dimension of the denialist critique; climate change science is rejected because it is perceived as normative regulation by the ‘left’. Similar to Edward Rubin’s “regulation phobia”,[1] the following takes the stance that trying to regulate climate change deniers only leads to further political polarization and thus is counter-productive. More specifically, the following analysis will focus on what we shall call the ‘disciplinary joke’. The disciplinary joke should be understood as Michel Foucault’s ideas in ‘Discipline and Punish’ and ‘Abnormal Lectures at the Collège de France’ applied to internet memes of climate change deniers.[2],[3] Since Foucault is frequently cited, yet often only superficially understood, his concepts on ‘examinatory justice’, ‘the abnormal individual’, ‘the exclusion of the leper’, ‘the panopticon’ and ‘normalizing gaze’ will be extensively explored first. Second, when applying these concepts to internet memes about climate change deniers, we will challenge the notion that such memes are ‘just a joke’, and identify internet memes as a decentralized tool of the ‘many’ to exert normalizing judgement. Third, we will express our concerns about the rise of climate change denier internet memes. Arguing that such memes exert normative regulation and prompt identity cues, we propose that the disciplinary joke only fuels the denier’s socially constructivist critique of politicized climate science and widens polarization on the issue.
If you don't want to read Foucault's Discipline and Punish [2] (you should!), this co-occurrence network captures pretty well, which words he used close by the word 'power'. If you want to read more about how I created this network, click here.
Part 1
The abolishment of torture in favour of modern means of punishment is commonly seen as a progressive move. Foucault begs to differ; he argues that both their ability to produce ‘truth’ and to legitimize the power to punish are problematic. He discusses how under old monarchies, criminals were tortured publicly until they confessed to committing the crime; confession implied guilt, whilst the lack of it indicated innocence. In other words, torture represented a ritual “open for all to see, the truth of the crime”.[4] Whilst in the past, the monarch could legitimize his power to punish through the confessions of the criminal or alternatively through brute force, the penal system of the early 19th century needed something less ‘arbitrary’. It required a “whole new system of truth”[5] – sometimes referred to as ‘regime of truth’. Foucault writes “A corpus of knowledge, techniques, 'scientific' discourses is formed and becomes entangled with the practice of the power to punish.”[6] He identifies a merging of penal law and the human sciences, where the scientific status of the latter legitimizes the former. Deriving its pedagogical character from the human sciences, the penal system is invested in correcting and preventing criminality. Or as Foucault summarizes:
“Hence a whole learned economy of publicity. (...) The example is now based on the lesson, the discourse, the decipherable sign, the representation of public morality. It is no longer the terrifying restoration of sovereignty that will sustain the ceremony of punishment, but the reactivation of the code, the collective reinforcements of the link between the idea of crime and the idea of punishment.”[7]
But before, we can understand what Foucault finds problematic about this new regime of truth, we have to understand the inherent shift from “inquisitorial” justice to “examinatory' justice”.[8]
Following the merging of penal law and the human sciences, the penal reformers stopped asking only: “Who committed it [the crime]. But: How can we assign the causal process that produced it?”[9] They sought to understand not what caused the singular transgression of the law but what constituted the ‘criminal’. They tried to capture their “biographical knowledge”;[10] focusing less on extenuating/environmental circumstances but on internal factors such as “impulses, drives, tendencies, inclinations, and automatisms”.[11] Regulating these internal factors was seen as a response to “the villain”, “the monster”, and “the madman”; it was a means to prevent the formation of the “abnormal individual”.[12] Previously, madness and criminality had been separate entities; the “Article 64” precluded those with dementia from being found guilty of a crime, thus rationality of the individual was a precondition to be eligible for crime.[13] However, if the abnormal individual posed a danger to society, the reformers needed the means to deal with abnormality. But why did the abnormal suddenly pose a danger to society?
As discussed previously, the new penal system required consensus from the social body, thus for an act requiring the applicability of law and punishment, it needed to represent a danger to society. Foucault writes:
“The injury that a crime inflicts upon the social body is the disorder that it introduces into it: the scandal that it gives rise to, the example that it gives, the incitement to repeat it if it is not punished. (…) One must calculate a penalty in terms not of the crime, but of its possible repetition.”[14]
A detailed example of this is illustrated in the first lecture of the ‘Abnormal Lectures at the Collège de France’.[15] Foucault further argues that abnormality hardly posed an intrinsic danger to society, but its medicalization was prompted by the historical development of the field of psychiatry. As the first journal in France to specialize in psychiatry was the “Annales d'hygiène publique”,[16] he states that long before the days of psychoanalysis and eugenics, long before psychiatry diagnosed the abnormal, it functioned as a “branch of public hygiene” and “social protection against all the dangers to society that may arise from the fact of illness”.[17] Thus, when psychiatry entered the penal system in the 19th century, it is not surprising that abnormality was framed as a ‘danger spreading through society’ (like a disease). Furthermore, Foucault writes:
“This institutional system is aimed at the dangerous individual, that is to say, at the individual who is not exactly ill and who is not strictly speaking criminal.”[18]
Here, we get to the crux of Foucault’s critique; he is less invested in the institutional medicalization of the ill or the institutional imprisonment of the criminal but regrets the institutionalized merging of the abnormal, criminal, and socially dangerous. He regrets that judgement is passed not on the actions of the criminal but on his character.
Before we discuss how the prison reformers responded to the abnormal, the criminal and the socially dangerous, let’s consider the following quote from Foucault:
“We pass from a technology of power that drives out, excludes, banishes, marginalizes, and represses, to a fundamentally positive power that fashions, observes, knows, and multiplies itself on the basis of its own effects.”[19]
Here Foucault describes a historical transition from the exclusion of the “lepers” to the inclusion of “plague victims” at the end of the 17th century.[20] They stopped limiting the spread of the disease through the exclusion of the infected. Instead, they controlled the plague by dividing the town into distinct quarters, recording knowledge of the infected, and intervening where necessary. Foucault describes this power as ‘positive’ not because he sees it as a progressive development; that would not be his style. Rather, it is indicative of his central statement of ‘power as productive’: “In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”[21] Foucault not only challenges the notion of power as ‘repressive’ but argues that within this new inclusion model, the intervening power is legitimized by the knowledge itself creates about the infected.
According to Foucault, the plague-stricken town is an exceptional situation; the more generalizable counterpart is the ‘panopticon’.[22] The panopticon, designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is an institutional building, where all prisoners can be observed by a single security guard in a central inspection tower. Crucial to this concept is the “observations, of eyes that must see without being seen”,[23] which implies that, as the prisoners cannot see the observer, they can never tell when they are being watched but always need to consider the possibility that they are. As discussed previously, prison reformers, which Bentham was one of, aimed to correct the criminal. The constant observation of the prisoners and their awareness of being watched should have a positive disciplinary effect on them. Furthermore, Foucault’s use of the words ‘eyes’ is an affirmation of the ‘human observer’. Linking this to his concept of “normalizing judgement”,[24] one may appreciate that the disciplining of the prisoner should be mediated by their awareness of the human judgement passed upon them. Once, Foucault also uses the term “normalizing gaze”,[25] which better captures the panoptic mechanism in not just facilitating normalizing judgement ‘after the fact’ prisoners have expressed deviance but as an omnipresent preventive mechanism inducing self-disciplining and self-censorship of deviant behaviour.
Bentham should be understood as a utilitarian thinker with an emphasis on efficiency. He uses the following ‘analogy of investment’: “Pain produced by punishment is like capital hazarded in expectation of profit”[26]. And in the context of military schools Foucault writes:
“A whole micro-penalty of time (lateness, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body ('incorrect' attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency).”[27]
Here, the ‘micro-penalty’ is understood as efficient because the punishment of a minor transgression prevents the onset of major transgressions. Thus, in summary, efficient means of preventing deviance are understood as utilitarian.
Besides prisons, Bentham also discussed the applicability of these themes also for schools, military schools and psychiatric institutions.[28] However, as Foucault outlines, the scope of the panopticon is much wider. He describes the formation of a “disciplinary society”,[29] where the power to punish extends through the social body in an “infinite minute web of panoptic techniques”.[30] He writes:
“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social worker'-judge.”[31]
The power to judge or discipline should not be understood as localized in a certain institution. As the power to punish is internalized across the entire social network, it will “no longer be perceived as a power of certain individuals over others, but as an immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual.”[32] What Foucault points out here is that because of the wide proliferation and internalization of ‘panoptic techniques’, these techniques are no longer seen as such. We are going back full circle to his concept of ‘regime of truth’; if panoptic techniques are not seen as such, the process of judgement distinguishing abnormality from normality is manifested into a ritual of truth.
Foucault finishes ‘Discipline and Punish’ by saying that it is a study of “the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society.”[33] The previous analysis has already hinted that Foucault’s analysis is a normative one. But it may be good to reiterate how the norm is maintained for Foucault. He writes:
“In this panoptic society of which incarceration is the omnipresent armature, the delinquent is not outside the law; he is (…) at the very heart of the law.”[34]
What he highlights is that knowledge about normality is directly constituted by what is abnormal. It is not as simple as to say that abnormality produced normality, but that abnormality is a means to discipline normality. Hence, the abnormal individual is at the very centre of normality.
Part 2
A dozen Foucault quotes later, we shall now draw the parallels with Climate Change Deniers. Arguing that the current treatment of deniers is like torture seems absurd. There are plenty of opinion pieces discussing how to ‘convince’ deniers,[35],[36],[37] but that is not the same as saying that climate change science relies on the confession of those not believing in it. Climate change denialism is not dangerous because it undermines the certainty of science but because it undermines the political consensus that could transform science into policy.
Although some authors discuss making denialism a crime,[38] a more common response has been to ban it on platforms such as Reddit and The Conversation.[39],[40]In this sense, people were less concerned about denialism on its own and more about its proliferation in the public discourse. If denialism is seen as ‘contagious’, it is not hard to see the banned denialist as the rebirth of the ‘excluded leper’. However, as explored in a must-read article on free speech and the culture wars in the 21st century,[41] banning speakers from some platforms only fuels the popularity of these ‘free speech warriors’ on other platforms. Being excluded fits into their narrative of a politicized climate change science controlled by ‘leftist universities’. Although demographically the roots of climate change denialism and social constructivism differ greatly,[42] the denialism argument is sort of constructivist.[43] Instrumentalizing the term ‘cancel culture’, authors like Burnett frame scientific institutions as “politically connected”, who can only maintain climate science through censorship.[44] And in Australian news, metaphors were used to create the conceptual metaphor “[climate] science is religion”.[45] Thus, the observation that the choice of platform becomes political illustrates the impact of the denialist’s critique in polarising society.[46] Foucault’s exclusion model of the leper does not seem to be a productive method in dealing with denialism. Hence, the following will consider whether his model of the ‘included plague victim’ offers a better alternative.
Can climate change deniers be understood as ‘abnormal individuals’ that require medical attention, if not correction? There is a YouTube Video with over 50 million views about ‘Climate Change Denial Disorders’,[47] a Wikipedia page about the ‘Psychology of climate change denial,[48] and an opinion piece in The Guardian discussing the four psychological types of climate deniers.[49] Such a medicalization is popularised and not the same as knowledge created by an accredited institution. When Foucault mentions the “doctor-judge” or “social worker-judge”,[50] the power to diagnose someone as abnormal is mediated through a “technical identity”.[51] When Foucault describes power as a technique used for an end and writes that “the judges of normality are everywhere”,[52] is he presenting an emancipatory, democratic vision of a society where everyone’s personal conception of normality contributes to collective normality, or alternatively is the ability to diagnose of what is normal and abnormal purely the privilege of to those with technical identities? As with all questions in life, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. To explore this issue, let us discuss internet memes.
An article published in the journal Environmental Communication discusses memes in the context of climate change.[53] The article differentiated between two meme logics of those ‘convinced’ and those ‘sceptical’ of climate change and collected memes fitting into either logic and into one of five frames related to climate change. The second (and most common) frame was ‘the hoax frame’: “The scientific claim of the risk is true.”[54] On the side of the convinced logic for the hoax frame, the researchers gave the following two memes as examples:
Both memes call out the sceptic as stupid. However, stupid in different ways. In a) the sceptic is stupid because he does not have the intellectual capacity to understand published scientific research. In b) the sceptic is stupid because he thinks of himself as superior to science, thus intelligence should be measured by one’s belief in climate change science. The difference here between understanding and believing science is subtle. In a) stupidity is the reason why the person does not understand the science and, as a result of that, is a climate sceptic. Whilst in b) the person is a sceptic because he does not believe in science, as the meme creator instrumentalizes the label of stupidity to equate belief in science with intelligence. Thus, a) is an explanatory joke and b) a disciplinary one. Not necessarily disciplinary in the sense that the meme creator’s intention was to fulfil a corrective function for climate change deniers, but his action should be understood in terms of Foucault’s conception of power as productive. The truth produced here is that one should believe in science. But problematically, a truth which is produced through discipline strongly resembles the socially constructivist critique by climate change deniers from earlier. Hence, if climate scientists want to let the facts speak for themselves and avoid being perceived as politically vested constructivist, disciplinary jokes might be counter-productive. So, the explanatory joke is the way to go? Not really. As the term ‘cognitive misers’ summarizes in a single phrase,[56] the majority of the population does not have the time to engage directly with scientific research about climate change. In an ideal world, the facts could speak for themselves but, in reality, society does not interact with science that way.[57] The disciplinary joke is more prevalent than the explanatory one for the same reason that most people convince themselves that climate change is true when 97% of scientists say so; because they do not have the time.
We earlier asked: Is normalizing power only accessible to those with technical identities or accessible to all? If anonymous memes have the power to normalize, we know it is not the technical identity. But it would be equally wrong to assert that normalizing the belief in science was a purely personal projection of the meme creator. Maybe, instead of arguing that the meme creator produces truth from scratch, it may be more appropriate to understand the meme as a reaffirmation of an already existing discourse valuing climate science. Hence, it is not that everyone has the power to create normality, to create a discourse of truth. Still, each one of us has the power to choose which normality, which discourse of truth we favour and whether we want to try exerting normalizing judgement on others. What we can learn from Foucault is that as the ‘web of panoptic techniques’ spreads out, as the power to normalize becomes available to all, we should watch out not to overlook it.
But are internet memes really a form of disciplining science? In a ‘sociology of humour’, Kuipers discusses how humour may have a functional role as a social corrective.[58] Yet, she also warns sociologists from attributing function when there is not any; sometimes a joke is “just a joke”.[59] Foucault describes power as an instrument used for a particular end,[60] so does this mean the meme creator needs to have the intention to correct climate deniers in order to do it? Powell would disagree.[61] He adopts a “wide-ranging” definition of control, arguing that one’s own view of social reality and one’s own labelling of what is normal and abnormal may influence others.[62] Inspired by Garfinkel’s Lodger experiment, he argues that humour is a mild form of control, whilst labelling someone as crazy or evil are respectively stronger versions of the same mechanism. In this sense, the memes about climate sceptics and ‘Climate Change Denial Disorder’ are merely different intensities of social control. Finally, why is joke disciplining science so prevalent in the 21st century? In an era of ‘post-truth’, surely, we would expect increased scepticism to come at the expense of science disciplining. For Powell, humour is a reaction to a primary deviance (see his discussion on Garfinkel). Thus, the disciplinary joke becomes so popular now not because our society is generally more disciplined but because it is a counter-reaction to the increased scepticism of our age. If disciplinary humour is understood as a means of the many, as an emancipatory normative tool, it is no wonder that when many people care about climate change that disciplinary climate jokes become so widespread.
Even though the disciplinary joke reacts to a primary deviance, that does not mean it is not preventive. It is not too difficult to track back climate change denialism as a primary deviance, its roots lie in conservative think tanks.[63] More difficult, however, is to understand what ‘being a climate change denier’ means in contemporary society. It is not enough to say that deniers are perceived as ‘abnormal’, that the dominant regime of truth is that of climate science acceptance, and that disciplinary jokes are the response to science denialism. In order to understand climate change denialism beyond its status as a primary deviance, we have to understand it simultaneously as the product as well as a means to an end of the panoptic technique controlling such denialism.
In a qualitative study Manokha finds that following Edward Snowden’s leak in 2013, many journalists started self-censoring their work more.[64] The author makes reference to Foucault’s panopticon arguing that the awareness of journalists about being watched induced more self-censorship and self-disciplining on their part. He goes on to argue that people on social media exhibit self-disciplining based on the “lowest-common-denominator effect”; that is to say they refrain from posting content they believe may offend their broadest group of acquaintances. How do people know what offends their social media acquaintances? By seeing what others post about. Now if we adopt Powell’s ‘wide-ranging’ definition of social control, we should acknowledge that every meme may exert a normalizing judgement on us. As the paper by Manokha shows, this social control is not just reactionary, it induces pre-emptive self-censorship; disciplinary humour becomes a preventive mechanism.
Every disciplinary meme about climate change deniers associates denialism directly with normalizing judgement. Soon, the judgement does not need to be explicit, calling someone a denier suffices. Just “as the delinquent is (…) at the very heart of the law”,[65] the climate change denier becomes the very centre of disciplinary humour. And as explored by Foucault’s ‘micro-penalty’, disciplinary action can start small. ‘A minute of lateness’, and a little bit of empathy with a climate sceptic; both induce a micro-penalty. And as this penalty is always geared towards the status of the abnormal individual, towards becoming a climate change denier, the transgressor is left with two choices, two extremes. Either he disciplines himself according to the micro-penalty or he embraces his future as the abnormal individual, as a climate change denier, as an outsider. Because of the micro-penalty, being in-between groups simply does not work anymore. He either disciplines himself or embraces denialism until the lowest-common-denominator of his social network is a denialist. He embraces his outside status until his old outside becomes his new inside.
But is the inclusion model exemplified by the disciplinary joke as counter-productive as the exclusion model (discussed earlier)? The difficulty in the answer to that question lies in the similarities of the two approaches. Exclusion should act as external censorship, whilst inclusion should prompt discipline and self-censorship. Yet, by trying to regulate the denier, both legitimize the denier’s socially constructivist critique of the science as ‘controlling’. Rubin makes a similar point when he argues that regulating the denier only further ignites the “regulation phobia” inherent in US-conservative values.[66] From this perspective, normative regulation creates a “boomerang effect”; a strategic message that “generates the opposite attitude or behaviour than was originally intended”.[67] Similarly, identity cues may produce a boomerang effect. Howarth & Sharman argue that the labeling of opinions in the climate debate may have contributed to political polarization.[68] Hart found experimentally that identity cues prompted Republicans to give less support for climate mitigation policies.[69] And a study of Australian news found that the term “greenhouse sceptic”, which was originally used “to label those seen to be outside the perceived consensus about climate change” was later embraced by sceptics as an empowering label.[70] The disciplinary joke combines both boomerang effects by simultaneously trying to regulate the denier and cueing his identity (see the previous paragraph). Thus, in summary, we propose that the inclusion model is not a viable alternative to the exclusion model and that internet memes directed at climate change deniers may be more than ‘just a joke’. Ending on a pessimistic note and with a semi-colon; Foucault would be proud.
References
[1] Rubin, E. (2016) “REJECTING CLIMATE CHANGE: NOT SCIENCE DENIAL, BUT REGULATION PHOBIA.” Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law 32.1. Pg 103–150. [2] Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Random House. [3] Foucault, M. (2003) Abnormal Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975. Verso. [4] See note 2 above, Pg 35. [5] Ibid., Pg 23. [6] Ibid., Pg 23. [7] Ibid., Pg 109-110. [8] Ibid. Pg 305. [9] Ibid. Pg 19. [10] Ibid. Pg 252. [11] See note 3 above, Pg 131. [12] See note 2 above, Pg 101. [13] See note 3 above [14] See note 2 above, Pg 92-93. [15] See note 3 above, Pg 1-4. [16] Ibid., Pg 118. [17] Ibid., Pg 118. [18] See note 2 above, Pg 34. [19] See note 3 above, Pg 48. [20] Ibid. Pg 74. [21] See note 2 above, Pg 194. [22] Ibid. [23] Ibid., Pg 171. [24] Ibid., Pg 170. [25] Ibid., Pg 184. [26] Manokha, I. (2018) “Surveillance, Panopticism, and Self-Discipline in the Digital Age.” Surveillance & society 16.1. Pg 219-237. [27] See note 2 above, Pg 178. [28] See note 26 above [29] See note 2 above, Pg 193. [30] Ibid., Pg 244. [31] Ibid., Pg 304. [32] Ibid., Pg 130. [33] Ibid., Pg 308. [34] Ibid., Pg 301. [35] Beck, C. (N.D.) “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming.” Grist. Grist. https://grist.org/series/skeptics/#Scientific%20Topics. (Accessed 06/01/2021) [36] Bokat-Lindell, S. (2020) “So You Want to Convince a Climate Change Skeptic” The New York Times. The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/opinion/climate-change-deniers.html. The New York Times (Accessed 06/01/2021) [37] Yoder, K. (2019) “How to change the minds of climate deniers.” The Guardian. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/03/climate-change-denial-changing-minds. The Guardian (Accessed 06/01/2021). [38] Tucker, W.C. (2012) “Deceitful Tongues: Is Climate Change Denial a Crime?” Ecology Law Quarterly 39.3. Pg 831-894. [39] Allen, N. (2013) “Should newspapers ban climate deniers like Reddit's science forum?” The Guardian. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/19/newspapers-ban-climate-deniers-reddit-science. (Accessed 03/01/2021). [40] Kenny, C. (2019) “The Conversation’s ban on climate change ‘deniers’ fails basics of academic rigour.” The Australian. THe Australian. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/the-conversations-ban-on-climate-change-deniers-fails-basics-of-academic-rigour/news-story/bcaf949266c839154ddee702ac6327f7. (Accessed 03/01/2021). [41] Davies, W. (2018) “The free speech panic: how the right concocted a crisis.” The Guardian. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/26/the-free-speech-panic-censorship-how-the-right-concocted-a-crisis. (Accessed 05/01/2021). [42] Hansson, S. (2020) “Social constructionism and climate science denial.” European journal for philosophy of science 10.3. Pg 1-27. [43] Fischer, F. (2019) “Knowledge politics and post-truth in climate denial: on the social construction of alternative facts.” Critical policy studies, 13.2. Pg 133-152. [44] Burnett, H.S. (2020) “Cancel Culture Dominates Climate Research, Canceling the Scientific Method.” The Epoch Times. The Epoch Times. https://www.theepochtimes.com/cancel-culture-dominates-climate-research-cancelling-the-scientific-method_3424575.html?welcomeuser=1. (Accessed 03/03/2021). [45] Jaspal, R., Nerlich, B., and Van Vuuren, K. (2016) “Embracing and resisting climate identities in the Australian press: Sceptics, scientists and politics.” Public Understanding of Science 25.7. Pg 807-824. [46] See note 41 above [47] Funny Or Die, (2015) “Climate Change Denial Disorder.” Youtube. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZTTI_0mHN0. (Accessed 23/11/2020). [48] Wikipedia, (N.D.) “Psychology of climate change denial.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_climate_change_denial. (Accessed 03/01/2021). [49] Carrington, D. (2020) “The four types of climate denier, and why you should ignore them all.” The Guardian. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/30/climate-denier-shill-global-debate. (Accessed 04/01/2021). [50] See note 2 above, Pg 304. [51] Foucault, M. (2009) Security, territory, population : lectures at the College de France 1977-78. Palgrave Macmillan. Pg 17. [52] See note 2 above, Pg 304. [53] Ross, A.S. and Rivers, D.J. (2019) “Internet Memes, Media Frames, and the Conflicting Logics of Climate Change Discourse.” Environmental communication 13.7. Pg 975-994. [54] Ibid., Pg 977. [55] Ibid., Pg 984. [56] Fiske, S.T. and Taylor, S.E. (2020) “Social Cognition evolves: Illustrations from our work on Intergroup Bias and on Healthy Adaptation.” Psicothema 32.3. Pg 291-297. [57] Latour, B. (2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Harvard University Press. [58] Kuipers, G. (2008) “Sociology of humour.” ThePrimer of Humor Research. Raskin, V., ed. De Gruyter Mouton. Pg 365-402. [59] Ibid., Pg 388. [60] See note 2 above, Pg 215. [61] Powell, C. (1988) “A Phenomenological Analysis of Humour in Society.” Humour in society: resistance and control. Paton, G.E., ed. Palgrave Macmillan UK Pg 86-105. [62] Ibid., Pg 98. [63] Jacques, P.J., Dunlap, R.E. and Freeman, M. (2008) “The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism.” Environmental politics, 17.3. Pg 349-385. [64] See note 26 above [65] See note 2 above, Pg 301. [66] See note 1 above [67] Byrne, S. and Hart, P.S. (2009) “The Boomerang Effect A Synthesis of Findings and a Preliminary Theoretical Framework.” Annals of the International Communication Association, 33.1. Pg 3-37. [68] Howarth, C.C. and Sharman, A.G. (2015) “Labeling opinions in the climate debate: a critical review.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 6.2. Pg 239-254. [69] Hart, P.S. and Nisbet, E.C. (2012) “Boomerang Effects in Science Communication.” Communication Research, 39.6. Pg 701-723. [70] See note 45 above
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