Curb Your Enthusiasm: On Media Communication of Bioenergy and the Role of the News Media in Technology Diffusion

Abstract

There is widespread agreement that the mitigation of climate changes requires societies across the globe to speed up the diffusion of renewable energy technologies. This article pursues an interest in the diffusion of one such technology: bioenergy. It does so through a study of how bioenergy is covered and communicated in the news media of Norway and Sweden, countries where the diffusion of this technology looks radically different. Mobilizing a domestication perspective, it finds that the news media in the two countries ascribe diverging meaning to the technology, offering audiences clearly varied images of what bioenergy “is.” In other words, the technology is domesticated in different ways, suggesting that media coverage plays a role in systems of innovation and diffusion. How this affects the public, however, is an under analyzed element in the innovation and diffusion literature, and the article calls for further investigation into this matter.