Attaining Sustainability: Multimodal fostering of environmentally sustainable practices in online videos

Individuals have an increasing interest in transitioning their everyday practices into environmentally sustainable ones to help mitigating climate change. Changing one’s practices can be laborious, however, as it requires learning new practices and integrating these into one’s lifestyle. IS can facilitate this transition by providing a forum for peer-to-peer learning support, but there is a need for a more nuanced understanding about how the IS enabled peer-to-peer learning support can be delivered effectively. This study examines how this peer-to-peer support unfolds as a multi-modal phenomenon in YouTube videos, where the protagonists are promoting environmentally sustainable practices to the viewer(s). Drawing on the theories of Apprentice learning and Activity theory and applying multimodal EM/CA methodology, this study addresses how the protagonists promote environmentally sustainable practices with their actions demonstrating sustainability as a sequence of multimodal micro-operations. Our initial results suggest that by giving primacy to these multimodal micro-operations over the actions, enhanced by an impression of real-time inter-activity and intersubjectivity, the protagonists aim at fostering environmental sustainability as attainable and natural way of life. Our results can be used for developing video-based IS for peer-to-peer learning support in general, and for designing video-based materials for promoting environmental sustainability in particular.