Flipping the Script: Creating Mass Change Through Social Networking Sites

Introduction

The consumption of meat has become a habitual practice in the United States. Stemming from the Second Industrial Revolution (Boundless, n.d.) in the nineteenth century, when society turned to capitalist modes of production, meat became a commodity—filling up U.S. dinner plates. While meat was consumed prior to the Industrial Revolution, it was only afforded by the elite and wealthy, therefore making it more popular and desired once it became cheaper. Marx (1867, p. 27) states:

In a capitalist society, Marx maintains that people desire commodities simply because of the value that has been attached to them. Today, meat and other animal products are a large part of the Standard America Diet or SAD (USDA, n.d.). Nowhere is the commodification of products and items of desire more visible than in the U.S. with factory farms killing millions of animals to produce cheap meat. A powerful influence on individuals’ conception of meat are the dominant industries that have profited from humans’ consumption of animal products, including the livestock, food, and pharmaceutical industries. These profitable businesses invest many dollars into marketing and advertising of their products, which fuels existing consumer behavior and the mass desire to eat meat.

Scientific evidence has proven that the consumption of meat is damaging to the human body and causes diseases (Marcus, 1998). Furthermore, the production of animals for human consumption is, and will continue to be, environmentally devastating. Factory farming not only produces large concentrates of pollutants, but also uses up natural resources, such as land and water (Marcus, 1998). Yet, despite this evidence, most individuals blindly consume meat and believe that it is an essential part of the human diet. Numerous researchers have studied the psychological and social dynamics of the consumption of meat, as well as methods of changing individuals’ dietary habits (Delahoyde & Despenich, 1994; Lucan et al., 2012). However, there have been no successful solutions to altering society’s meat-eating mentality or to creating omnipresent behavior modifications. Thus, the question remains: How does one shift the social norm of meat consumption in a society whose thought processes and behaviors are governed by dominant power structures (media and advertising) and (constructed) habitual forces?

The purpose of this chapter is to approach social networking sites (SNSs) as networked publics for the construction of new social norms that censor the consumption of meat and reconfigure dietary practices which eliminate the eating of meat and establish the new standard script for eating in the U.S. Script theory, borrowed from the cognitive sciences, is used as a theoretical lens to understanding social media as agents of change. Applying script theory to endemic health and social problems has limitedly been studied (Enticott & Vanclay, 2011) and is a novel approach to mass social change.

This chapter discusses the stages of “Flipping the Script” of the SAD. First, embedding immersive experiences within SNSs is projected to expose individuals to the realities of the consumption of meat and to introduce new ways of thinking. Once engaged with the media and rhetoric of meat consumption, individuals will be motivated and compelled to participate in causal challenges and perform new behaviors and activities that are propagated through online sociality. Lastly, the reproduction of real-life social change will occur in online spaces as individuals reinforce one another’s newly formed dietary behaviors and the script for eating, which eliminates meat, will become the new social norm.