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Abstract

This study explores young people's concepts of nature as realized online, using the Web as both research environment and research tool. Nature writers who examine concepts or visions of nature rarely incorporate new media within their studies, while new media scholars are generally more interested in culture than nature. This study attempts to bridge this disciplinary gap through informed dialogue about ideas of nature in the modern, digitally enabled, increasingly media-centric world. An online questionnaire was used to gather quantitative and qualitative responses about nature from 504 New Zealand university students, and each student was asked to share a social media site that is indicative of nature for her or him. The findings from this study indicate that mass-mediated representations of nature that now appear online continue to reflect and inform how people think about the natural world. Furthermore, the Web is significant in terms of actualizing people's ideas about nature and enabling (and potentially promoting) certain nature concepts over others, most notably reimaging nature as the more entangled and politicized “environment.” These findings challenge the ongoing significance of well-documented nature images that are used to understand people's cultural visions of nature. This article argues for new perspectives on understanding people's concepts or visions of nature, most notably ones that accommodate the potential for different ideas in a rapidly changing human-nature landscape (both online and offline). Key Words: Concepts of nature—Web 2.0—Nature 2.0—Young people—New Zealand—New biophilia.

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Young Adults' Concepts of Nature Realized Online: Nature 2.0

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