The Anthropocene: genesis of a term and popularization in the press

IF 0.8 3区文学 Q3 COMMUNICATION

Text & Talk Pub Date : 2022-02-02 DOI:10.1515/text-2020-0080

A. Zottola, Claudio de Majo

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引用次数: 3

Abstract

Abstract The term Anthropocene first appeared in 2000 when scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer attempted to define the environmental effects of anthropic activities. Since then, it has become a widespread, but also controversial, term in the academic community. As environmental discourses increasingly permeate our lives, it has trespassed the borders of scholarly traditions, becoming acknowledged in popular culture. Bearing in mind the pivotal role the press has in the popularization, dissemination and consequent understanding of given topics, the aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it assesses the popularity of the term Anthropocene in online and printed newspapers around the world. Secondly, it examines the degree of scientificity of the articles included in our analysis to understand the type of discourses journalists are relying on in discussing the Anthropocene. Exploring these questions, through a corpus-based discourse analysis, enabled us to assess the weight of the term ‘Anthropocene’ in contemporary popular debates and its future horizons. The findings highlight a lack of a consistent discussion of the Anthropocene stemming not only from a poor scientific understanding of its ecological drives, but also from the lack of political awareness and a general unpreparedness to face the socio-environmental implications of the Age of Humankind.

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人类世:一个术语的起源和在新闻界的普及

摘要人类世一词最早出现在2000年，当时科学家Paul Crutzen和Eugene Stoermer试图定义人类活动对环境的影响。从那时起，它在学术界成为了一个广泛但也有争议的术语。随着环境话语越来越多地渗透到我们的生活中，它已经侵入了学术传统的边界，在流行文化中得到了认可。考虑到新闻界在普及、传播和理解特定主题方面的关键作用，本文的目的是双重的。首先，它评估了“人类世”一词在世界各地的网络和印刷报纸上的流行程度。其次，它考察了我们分析中文章的科学性程度，以理解记者在讨论人类世时所依赖的话语类型。通过基于语料库的话语分析，探索这些问题，使我们能够评估“人类世”一词在当代流行辩论中的分量及其未来前景。这些发现突显了对人类世缺乏一致的讨论，这不仅源于对其生态驱动力的科学理解不足，还源于缺乏政治意识和对人类时代的社会环境影响的普遍不准备。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Text & Talk Multiple-

CiteScore

1.70

自引率

16.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.