Social Media Hub for the AU Forum on The Climate Change Generation

What does climate change mean to you? from Andrea Posner on Vimeo.

Students in AU Professor David Johnson’s class on interactive media have created a social media and discussion site for tonight’s American Forum on “The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World.”

Features at the site include video interviews with AU students on the topic (see above), a Twitter feed that student attendees and public radio listeners will be posting to, a Facebook group, a news aggregator on climate change, and various topic driven discussion boards with topics ranging from policy options to evaluation of news coverage

Use of the site is just getting started and there is likely to be a swarm of activity leading up to tomorrow night’s event and across the week as students, public radio listeners, and Web viewers discuss the panel and weigh in on the findings of the corresponding survey report that is scheduled to be released.

Check back here all this week for updates, news coverage of the event, and for the release of the survey report Tuesday morning. Authored by AU professor Lauren Feldman in collaboration with myself and colleagues Anthony Leiserowitz (Yale University) and Edward Maibach (George Mason University), the report includes a new analysis of nationally representative survey data collected by Leiserowitz and Maibach in January 2010.

The report finds that Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 are, for the most part, split on the issue of global warming and, on some indicators, relatively disengaged when compared to older generations. Journalists can contact me at nisbet AT american DOT edu for an advance embargoed copy.