An exploration of sustainability and unsustainability on daily media content and its implications for media education : a qualitative content analysis of Snapchat

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore current situation of sustainability and unsustainability on daily media content. Based on empirical data, the aim of the exploration was to advise potentialities of future media education and to provide possible directions to improve media literacy. The research design of this study examined headline articles of popular online media through the angle of sustainability. The sustainability in this study was based on a holistic perspective which Birdsall (2014) indicated should entail "environmental, socio-cultural and the economic components" (p.818).

Media content of this study was collected from two media outlets, BuzzFeed and Daily Mail under their Snapchat Discover channels, one piece a day continuing for one month. The study used qualitative content analysis as the research method. Qualitative content analysis allowed researchers to interpret meaning of data through a specific angle and then reduced materials to a comprehensive coding frame (Schreier, 2012). The coding frame was developed from previous literature of sustainability and the collected media content. The final coding frame was aimed to present characteristics of current phenomenon on daily media content in relation to sustainability. According to the analysis of the coding frame, the study concluded three characteristics of sustainability and unsustainability on daily media content. They were a scarcity of content related to environmental sustainability, dominance of unsustainability and a few positive exceptions of content related to sustainability. After that, some suggestions and implications were provided for development of media literacy and media education in terms of sustainability in the future.