ABSTRACT

While the field of climate change communication has become increasingly interested in visual representations, there has been a lack of research that attempts to capture the breadth and variety of semiotic resources being drawn upon in the contemporary media landscape. In this paper, social semiotic theory is drawn upon for investigating how colour and sound may contribute to the social construction of risk in a sample of four professionally produced Norwegian educational videos, all of which are aimed at explaining the reality and danger of anthropogenic climate change. The results indicate that the colour schemes and soundscapes of the videos contribute meaning potentials with affective resonances apt for the social construction of risk, and that the videos construe the risk differently. The authors suggest that in two of the sampled videos, the uses of colour and sound are apt for attenuating the risk perceived by the viewer, while in two other videos they are used in a manner apt for amplifying the perceived risk. Implications of these results are discussed in light of previous research on multimodal climate communication.

摘要

尽管气候变化传播领域对视觉表示越来越感兴趣，但缺乏研究试图捕捉当代媒体环境中广泛使用的符号学资源的研究。本文以社会符号学理论为基础，通过四个挪威专业制作的教育视频样本来研究颜色和声音如何对社会风险建设做出贡献，所有这些视频旨在说明人为气候变化的现实和危险。 。结果表明，视频的配色方案和音景有助于形成具有潜在的感性潜能，并具有情感共鸣的倾向，易于适应风险的社会建构，并且视频对风险的理解也有所不同。作者建议在两个采样视频中，颜色和声音的使用易于减弱观看者感知到的风险，而在另外两个视频中，它们的使用则倾向于放大感知到的风险。根据先前对多模式气候通信的研究，讨论了这些结果的含义。