Here's a silly question, but one I'd like to pose anyway: What comes to mind when you hear the word 'environment'?I was asking myself this question today, hoping to generate a list of items that are associated with this word. The first two items that came to my mind were green and hippie. Good grief--I blame my friend Dan for the hippie reference, which I continue to deny as part of my self-schema!
Anyway, feel free to play this word association game with me. Who knows what we may learn about our views concerning the environment!
3 comments:
green, earth day, toxic waste, love canal, plastic bags, six-pack rings, give a hoot--don't pollute, woody, litter bug, trees, carbon dioxide, oxygen, Ozone, fluorocarbons, 3-mile island, fish you can't eat, hunting, catch-and-release, PETA, fur, furry animals, protests, recycling, reusing, context, suburban sprawl, extinction, SUVs, air quality, acid rain, Canada, water in plastic bottles, plastic bottles, what to do with the caps, my recycling bin--green but plastic, empty wine bottles, park bench chairs made out of recycled plastic, tire swings, oil slicks, Exxon Valdez, big oil, Enron, hydroelectric power, Niagara Falls, wind mills, hybrid cars, Montessori, Mother Earth, "Love your Mother," ELF, Eco-terrorism, tree-huggers, not-dogs, tofurkey, vegans, the cow that appreciated a water view, Michael Pollan, fertilizer, fertilizer run off, algae, whales, Christmas tree farms, fish farms, pig farms, pig crap, chicken farms, chicken crap, lawyers, the EPA, James Watt, Reagan, The Environmental President, National Forests, Alaska, Mt. St. Helens, smog, Los Angeles, Steve Martin, and that's all!
You could do this more formally in an experiment and see a few things...frequency of words, whether certain words are more likely to be high or low on the list (i.e., Steven Martin probably would appear infrequently on lists and more to the bottom as it appears on Dan Myers, while green would appear more to the top and more frequently on different people's list. The question is what to do with this semantic network and what exactly it might tell you. You could make a concept network by then choosing common words and asking people to do the same thing with "green" and "earth day" - I don't know what one could do with such a map but it could be pretty. My problem is that seeing someone else's list primes me such that I feel that I can't come up with my own list that is not primed by the one already there!
Wow. Dan pretty much covered all the ones I would have said plus a lot more I'd never have thought of. Oh, here's one. That commercial from the 70's with the Native American riding on his horse with a tear in his eye as a woman tosses trash out of her car.
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