The Effectiveness of Eco-Influencers in Increasing Eco-Literacy: A Critical Discourse Analysis

¹ Department of Communication Science, State University of Surabaya, Indonesia
² Department of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Sheffield, UK

^* Corresponding author: muhammadabduh@unesa.ac.id

Abstract

The urgency of public discourse on the worsening environmental crisis caused by air, land, and sea pollution has shifted the common paradigm regarding fundamental issues related to sustainability. At the same time, the presence of technology that facilitates digital interaction is changing the way people approach, comprehend, and engage in environmental awareness campaigns. Social media's dual role as a platform to educate and create mindset facilitates the emergence of eco-influencers, which reinforce environmental ethics through graphic and linguistic narratives. Employing the 300 comments collected from multiple environmental digital users on Instagram, this study wishes to reveal how digital creators and online users synergize to construct environmental meaning by integrating both Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough and Multidimensional Discourse by Kress & ven Leeuwen. The collected data is then classified based on the level of awareness of environmental literacy, which consists of neutral, truthful, and result-driven language. Consequently, visual elements that refer to the concept of everyday ecology support sustainability as a moral and aesthetic lifestyle and environmental advocacy as a responsibility carried by individuals. The results show that although the discourse about the environment in the digital world supports collective awareness, the limitation in this study lies in the critical literacy of structural environmental awareness.