Climate Change Challenges Extended Society and Its Literate Mediation

ABSTRACT: Writing as an infrastructural social technology has coevolved and interacted with social organization for five millennia. However, climate change is disrupting our intertwined socio-communicative systems, starting with the textual means of identifying scientific authority and making it relevant to government policy. Other textually mediated social systems are being disrupted by the material consequences of climate change and the fracturing of knowledge systems, including systems seemingly distant from climate change. Some of the disruptive pressures may be integrated into current arrangements, but others may instigate more fundamental social changes and newer forms of communicative mediation. Observing and understanding textual changes can help us innovate socio-communicative systems for our changing world.