Greta Thunberg’s iconicity: Performance and co-performance in the social media ecology

Watching a movement begin (on Twitter)

With the school strike, initiated on 20 August 2018 in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm, Thunberg popularized a performance and protest repertoire (Tarrow, 1998) with deep historical roots (Rodgers, 2020). Thunberg has described how her school strike was particularly inspired by pupils refusing to go school following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in February 2018 (Thunberg, 2019a). As she struggled to find anyone willing to accompany her, she decided to initiate the strike on her own. Thunberg’s loneliness, however, did not last for long: “The first day, I sat alone from about 8.30am to 3pm, the regular school day. And then on the second day, people started joining me. After that, there were people there all the time” (quoted in Watts, 2019). This rapid transformation from lonely school striker to inspirator and activist entrepreneur with a following is at least partly attributable to social media-driven connective action (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). Thunberg describes how the first thing she did “was to post on Twitter and Instagram what I was doing and it soon went viral. Then journalists and newspapers started to come” (quoted in Watts, 2019). In her first tweet from 20 August 2018, Thunberg (2018a) angrily remarked,

We children rarely do what you tell us to do, we do as you do. And since you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future, neither will I. I school strike for the climate until election day [9 September].

The reaction was immediate, with several tweets expressing support and some asking to join her. Reflecting Twitter’s word limits, the exchanges are brief and practical. In one of the first responses, a user replies, “Greta, you are awesome! I am a politician for the @The Feminists and attend high school. Can I come and school strike with you?” Thunberg’s response is quick and matter of fact: “Absolutely! Outside Parliament during school time,” and, in a later tweet to her supporters, “Anyone can sit down in front of their local councils.” The rapid response clearly reflected how Thunberg’s timing of her school strike with the upcoming national election in Sweden presented a favorable political opportunity moment. With the issue of climate change high on the agenda, the strike resonated with many Swedes’ growing concern with the environment.

Reading through these tweets is, literally, to watch a movement begin. The early crowd joining in is a motley one, consisting of youth and adults, politicians, cultural personalities, and “ordinary” people. These early tweets also give a strong taste of the counter-iconizing reactions that have followed Thunberg throughout her iconic career: “How to explain to her that nothing is going to change, but that she should go back to school” is just one among numerous tweets expressing disapproval of the fact that she was cutting classes. Another recurring theme links Thunberg to her mother, famous Swedish opera singer Malena Ernman: “I feel sorry for Greta who is being so brainwashed by her mother,” one tweeter writes, while others suggest that her school strike strategically coincided with her family’s publication of a book describing their daughters’ struggles with mental disorders (see below for more detail): “Will you be allowed to [go] back to school,” one tweeter thus asks sarcastically, “when your mother has published her book?” (the book was published on 23 August 2018).

Despite the negativity, the early Twitter response was overwhelmingly positive. Over the following days and weeks, more and more people joined. On the last day of the strike, on 8 September, “altogether 1,000 children and adults sit with Greta,” while “media from several different countries report live . . .” (Ernman, 2020). The interactive, hybrid dynamic between social and legacy media (Chadwick, 2013) is obvious here: attention is created through Twitter, but the movement gains momentum and wider public appeal through expanding newspaper and television coverage. According to Malena Ernman, this first wave of the school strike concluded with what is probably Thunberg’s first public speech. As if foreseeing the coming global resonance and the power of social media to spread her message, she says, “ am going to speak in English now. And I want you to take out your phones and film what I’m saying. Then you can post it on your social media” (quoted in Ernman, 2020).

While going it alone can be an powerful factor in iconic performance (I discuss this in more detail below), it is also potentially limiting if not propped up by resources and some degree of organizational backing. Thunberg had neither to begin with. Yet the connective power of social media made such adverse preconditions less debilitating (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012), or put differently, it enabled a fast-paced inflow of resources (in the form of skilled supporters, etc.) that were not tied to specific organizations, funds, or parties. This resource flow eventually led to the formalization of the Fridays for Future platform, but this is, precisely, a platform rather than an organization, a networking site with contact information, protest statistics, and information resources, and entirely run by volunteers. Fridays for Future’s (2020) own statistics have documented no less than 108,000 strike events in 7500 cities and 228 countries since 2018. This staggering diffusion of the school strike repertoire within the span of just a year and a half is perhaps the strongest example to date of what can be accomplished with limited initial resources in the social media ecology. Thunberg’s impact on climate activism within the Fridays for Future movement is a general one, but most pronounced among children and young people. In a recent survey from the September 2019 climate protests, data reveal that a notable 40% of young participants refer to Greta Thunberg as a significant inspiration for their participation (de Moor et al., 2020: 23). The reaction from young people at least partly stems from Thunberg’s presence on several social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. These platforms enable younger age groups to access political communication to an extent that was not available in an age when newspapers and television, catering primarily to adult audiences, dominated the communication landscape. Since the school strike repertoire is a performance so evidently directed at children and youth, the ability to inspire and mobilize emulating co-performance was strongly facilitated by the access to “alternative” communication flows of social media.

Future framing and the reluctant child activist

As opposed to other icons (Malala Yousafzai, for example), Thunberg’s protest carried little physical and legal risk, occurring as it did in a fully democratic country with extensive rights and protections. Iconicity often emerges from the drama that unfolds when the bodies of “weak” individuals are exposed to the raw power and violence of the state or other “systems of authority” (Olesen, 2015; Snow and Soule, 2009). Thunberg also entered into a dramatic relationship with the state, but in an almost reversed manner: instead of provoking the ire of the system, her iconic performance rather sought to expose the state’s inertia and apathy. In one of her earliest transcribed speeches from 24 November 2018, Thunberg (2018b) outlines what has become a red thread in her interventions, linking the school strike with the system’s inability and/or unwillingness to act decisively against climate change: “. . . what is the point of learning facts in the school system, when the most important facts, given by the finest science of that same school system, clearly mean nothing to our politicians and our society?”

The dramatic plot of the performance becomes one where an active and concerned citizen desperately tries to make the system listen and react. While this intervention may not involve risk in Thunberg’s case, it does entail sacrifice. Thunberg and the millions of school strikers who have followed her example engage in a unique form of future framing where the present is infused with a sense of imperative acuteness in light of the impending future catastrophe of climate change: “Why,” Thunberg (2018b) asks rhetorically, “should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more?” Sacrificing education, and other normal routines, becomes a way of impressing on a lethargic political system the critical phase in which humanity finds itself. Iconicity in some ways resembles celebrity, but it works on a different logic. While it is acceptable for pop stars and other celebrities to actively seek fame and attention, iconic protagonists cannot aggressively seek such status. Their performances must demonstrate reluctance, a sense that the protagonist accepts a difficult task on behalf of a collective despite doubts and personal sacrifice. This dramatic element has special credibility when the protagonist is a child. This theme is nowhere more effectively conveyed than in Thunberg’s (2019b) speech at the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York, 23 September 2019. “This is all wrong,” she opens, clearly emotionally affected. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” Children and young people, in other words, are forced to do the political work that adults ought to be doing while children ought to go to school.

That children and young people need to step into this role bears out the imperative nature of the fight against climate change. It plays on an emperor’s new clothes theme in which children are able to see through the deceptions of adults. The child is “pure,” not (yet) caught up in the contrived world of adults (and especially politicians) who are unable to see the bigger picture because of their economic and political self-interests. “We are in the beginning of mass extinction,” Thunberg proclaims later in the speech, “and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” The world of adults is corrupted and only children and young people acting with a kind of moral purity can expose the truth. While Thunberg does not say so directly, it is clearly an interpretive line picked up and developed by her co-performing audiences on social media, in particular in the commentary tracks of her Facebook page. There is an almost para-social, confessionary tone in many of the comments. The commentary track on Thunberg’s Facebook post of the UN speech (6100 comments) is full of responses from adults who praise her for “having the bravery to do what so many adults refuse” to do or concede that “We grownups should all be ashamed. We are the ones who are supposed to protect future generations, and we have so far failed.”

Iconization processes are obstructed if it appears that a protagonist pursues personal economic or power interests. These suspicions can more readily be removed from the equation when the protagonist is child. Nevertheless, other counter-iconization wedges have appeared in their place, where Thunberg’s identity as a child is precisely what is turned against her. These counter-iconic interventions are found throughout the commentary and dialogical affordances of the social media platforms that Thunberg uses. In particular, counter-iconizers portray her as a tool in the hands of adults. “Most do not want to understand,” says one comment to Thunberg’s Facebook post of her 23 September speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, “that this child is instrumentalized and manipulated. She is a puppet of the lobby and the elites.” The elites that are referred to in these reactions include the left, the Democrats, George Soros, and Bill Gates. As discussed in the preceding section, the elite connection is consistently legitimated with reference to Thunberg’s parents, who are portrayed as part of the cultural elite, reducing her to “a hysterical child with abusive parents.”

This counter-iconizing drive has been so pervasive that the iconic protagonist herself has felt compelled to publicly correct it. In a lengthy Facebook post from 11 February 2019, Thunberg (2019b) is adamant that “there is no one ‘behind’ me except for myself. My parents were as far from climate activists as possible before I made them aware of the situation.” She also makes it clear that she is “not part of any organization. I sometimes support and cooperate with several NGOs that work with the climate and environment. But I am absolutely independent and I only represent myself.” Independence is not just political, but financial, she underlines: “. . . I do what I do completely for free, I have not received any money or any promise of future payments in any form at all” (see also Rodgers, 2020: chapter 6). These exchanges take place outside the remit of legacy media. Just as the negative comments are a pervasive feature of the dialogical affordances of Thunberg’s social media platforms, her effort to counter them also occurs through these communicative circuits. In the opening to the post, Thunberg consequently calls on her Facebook followers to “help me communicate this to the grownups who lie about me and family.” The 292,000 likes, 32,000 comments, and 219,000 shares that this post has drawn so far are a powerful testament to the mobilizing capacities of the social media ecology in the ongoing negotiations over her iconic meanings.

Metamorphosis and catharsis

Iconic performances are permeated by narratives of resistance and ordeals and how these are overcome by the protagonist (Olesen, 2020). The power to act against these forces stands out as all the more impressive when the protagonist is a child. A child and school pupil is subject to restraining authority in ways that adults are not and, in addition, is limited in experience and resources. Thunberg, then, not only started her strike in the absence of supporters and resources, as discussed earlier, but also against her parents’ wishes:

When I told my parents about my plans they weren’t very fond of it. They did not support the idea of school striking and they said that if I were to do this I would have to do it completely by myself and with no support from them. (Thunberg, 2019a)

For a 15-year-old to proceed under these rather unconducive circumstances is a powerful performance that demonstrates a degree of moral and political determination that sets her apart from the large majority of her age group.

This lack of support in the early phases was not the only obstacle she had to overcome. Thunberg and her family have been open about her Asperger’s diagnosis, and on her Twitter and Instagram accounts she even introduces herself as a “17 year old climate and environmental activist with Asperger’s.” While her diagnosis has been used against her by counter-iconizers, it only makes her accomplishments even more impressive in the eyes of her co-performing supporters, a testament to her willingness and ability to overcome severe personal challenges in the quest for justice. In a series of tweets from 31 August 2019, Thunberg (2019c) herself has portrayed her diagnosis as a positive resource and “a superpower.” Elsewhere (Thunberg, 2019a) she even links her adoption of the school strike repertoire with her diagnosis: “. . . if I would have been ‘normal’ and social I would have organized myself in an organisation, or started an organisation by myself. But since I am not that good at socializing I did this instead.” She does, however, also acknowledge how her diagnosis has limited her. The August 2019 tweets describe a personal journey, a kind of metamorphosis, or even catharsis, through becoming an activist:

Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I did not speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless. (Thunberg, 2019c)

Using her personal social media stages to draw up this contrast between her situation before and the girl now berating world leaders with a stern, determined look is a vivid performative demonstration of the ordeals that she has had to face to transform herself into the global icon Greta Thunberg.

This dramatic contrast in the creation myth of Greta Thunberg is under continuous construction. In March 2020, the Thunberg family published a co-authored book (Thunberg et al., 2020) detailing Greta’s struggles with eating disorders, depression, and bullying (the book’s title, Our House is On Fire, alludes to a speech held by Thunberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2019, which she opened with these words). Before being diagnosed with Asperger’s, the book recounts, the family went through periods of deep frustration where Thunberg more or less stopped eating and teetered on the brink of psychiatric hospital admission. During this time Thunberg began to tell her parents about systematic bullying at her school. “It’s like a movie montage,” her mother recalls, “featuring every imaginable bullying scenario. Stories about being pushed over in the playground, wrestled to the ground, or lured into strange places” (Ernman, 2020).

Thunberg’s parents put their careers more or less on hold in the effort to turn things around and gradually, Thunberg began to recover. Her “return” to life was accompanied by a growing awareness of environmental and climate problems. Malena Ernman describes how Greta increasingly berated her parents for not paying enough attention and leading climate-unfriendly lifestyles (frequent flying, etc.). In Ernman’s account, Greta’s insistence acquired an almost prophetic character: “She saw what the rest of us did not want to see. It was as if she could see our CO2 emissions with her naked eye. The invisible, colourless, scentless, soundless abyss that our generation has chosen to ignore.” The first climax in this process comes with her decision to school strike in August 2018. As discussed earlier, her initiative rapidly catches on. While she struggles at first to adapt to this new situation, Thunberg increasingly embraces it. “Greta’s energy is exploding,” her mother recalls. “There doesn’t seem to be any outer limit, and even if we try to hold her back she just keeps going.” Becoming the activist Greta Thunberg, in other words, is as much a personal as a political trajectory, shredding off the years of loneliness, depression, and bullying to formulate a new role for herself: weakness and limitation transformed to strength and opportunity.

Thunberg’s openness about her diagnosis and personal struggles have invited numerous expressions of intimacy and emotion, many from people recounting their own personal struggles with autism, and so on, or telling Thunberg to ignore the counter-iconizing haters that turn her diagnosis against her. In the comments on the third (12,600 retweets and 159,700 likes) of the three tweets Thunberg posted on 31 August, one poster tells her that “You are a Superpower and we love you for it . . . You are beautiful and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” while another tells her not “to listen to the disgusting immature adults who are so threatened by your passion.” Binarily coded expressions of intimacy and emotional attachment such as “passion,” “love,” “beautiful,” “sweet child,” and “dear child” are recurring in the co-performing audience responses to Thunberg’s posts and speeches.

Photogenicity and visual plasticity

Many of the iconic meanings of Greta Thunberg, and perhaps most starkly the weakness–strength binary discussed above, are inscribed on the photographic documentation of her early school strike. In what is reportedly the first photograph of the school strike (dated 20 August), taken by Swedish photographer Adam Karls Johannson, Thunberg is seen sitting against the walls of the Swedish parliament with a homemade sign with “School strike for the climate” (Skolstrejk för klimatet) written on it. Even though power here is inert and impersonal, the contrast between the lone, frail individual and the “system of authority” (Snow and Soule, 2009) is nonetheless striking. The contrast is amplified by the fact that the person in the photograph is a child. The sign with “school strike” suggests that Thunberg is a pupil, just as the schoolbag and water bottle underline her identity. Her bodily appearance exudes childlike frailty, with its diminutive size, her legs pulled up, and shoes pointing toward each other. Beside her, a stone holds down a modest stack of leaflets describing who she is and why she is striking. The original sign has become a key prop in Thunberg’s performance, appearing with her in the original Swedish in the countless protest events she has taken part in since 2018, its emblematic character imprinted on the range of Thunberg merchandise, from cups and T-shirts to smartphone covers, that is now available. There is a significant literature around iconic images of suffering children (e.g. Hariman and Lucaites, 2007; Olesen, 2018). In this research, the child is often a relatively passive victim of violence (e.g. the Napalm Girl during the Vietnam War, Alan Kurdi). Greta Thunberg’s physical appearance and imagery retain some of the moral power of the child’s frailty and innocence, but at the same time subvert it into an active stance where she takes charge of her own destiny, and where her frailty becomes a sign of extreme courage and heroism as it is symbolically thrust against an “opponent” of much superior size (Klapp, 1948) (Image 1).

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Image 1.

Greta Thunberg at the Swedish Parliament, 20 August.

The photograph (and other similar ones from the first strike days) has become central in the iconizing creation myth. According to Adam Karls Johannson (personal correspondence, 19 March 2020), the photograph was “discovered” with some delay and did not achieve major impact until about a year after it was taken. The renewed focus followed an online article on the first anniversary of Thunberg’s school strike by Ingmar Rentzhog (2019), CEO and founder of the Swedish climate organization We Don’t Have Time, which profiled the uncut version of Johannson’s photograph (Johannson was working as a part-time photographer for We Don’t Have Time when he took the photograph after having gone to the site of Thunberg’s protest together with Rentzhog on 20 August 2018, some of the first to do so).

The photograph’s (re)circulation occurred on the wave of protest that was taking shape in August and September 2019 in the lead-up to the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York on 23 September. During this time, the photograph often appeared in a constellation with photographs of major street protests around the world. The dramatic plot in these stories, many of them told via Twitter, was the incredible change in just about a year from one lonely school striker to an estimated six million protesters all over the world. “I find this picture so incredibly moving,” Louise McDonald (2019) wrote in a tweet (225,000 likes and 58,000 retweets), copying a cut version of Johannson’s original photograph: “This is @GretaThunberg aged 15, sat alone outside the Swedish Parliament Aug 2018—the first school strike. In just 1 year, she’s created a wave that will change the whole world. Never underestimate the power of one young person.” The impact of the photograph is evident in responses to McDonald’s tweet, with one calling it “a bit of a Rosa Parks moment” and another confessing that “I had a little weep this morning when they said on the radio that Greta’s first protest was alone.” In a world of social media, the iconic process is constantly unfolding, recharged, and redirected by the co-performing intervention of lay audiences. It is notable in these processes that the lines between producers and audiences constantly shift. In the above tweet, McDonald is both audience and producer: a “recipient” of Johannson’s original photograph, she produces new, potentially iconizing meanings around Thunberg by re-contextualizing it in another temporal and political situation through a kind of creation myth for the global climate movement. This process does not stop with the tweet, but continues through the 1500 comments it has generated since its publication.

The role of photographs in the new media ecology is not limited to the meaning work around “originals.” The co-performing participation of the audience is perhaps nowhere more evident and creative than in the re-mixing, cartooning, and photo-shopping of photographs (Boudana et al., 2017). Many of these are circulated on Twitter and Instagram and take the form of memes that employ photographs of Thunberg in new, often humorous contexts. With her braided hair and Swedish origin, the comparison with Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, a children’s literature favorite with superpowers and a distaste for authority, is an obvious one to make, for example. Thunberg’s physical appearance is in general photogenic and visually plastic, lending itself eminently to visual reproduction and caricature. Her braided hair her gives her a distinctive look, while her facial expression combines an innocent and mild childishness with a penetrating and serious stare that corresponds well with her iconic persona: a “vulnerable” child on a mission that requires enormous moral and mental strength, carrying the burden that adults ought to be carrying for her, a visual embodiment of the slogan that has come to capture the new child- and youth-driven struggle against climate change: “No one is to too small to make a difference” (this is also the title of Greta Thunberg’s (2019d) book, which collects her best known speeches) (Image 2).

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Image 2.

Greta Thunberg cartoon by Sara Mara.

Visually, Thunberg has become strongly associated with the yellow raincoat she was first seen wearing on rainy days during her initial school strike in August 2018 (the first yellow raincoat photograph was probably Michael Campanella’s from 28 August, available on Getty Images). Since then, Thunberg has appeared in the raincoat on numerous protest occasions, just as it has become a defining visual feature of murals, graffiti, and merchandise. In Sara Mara’s image above the yellow raincoat blends with the Pippi Longstocking reference while making another inter-iconic gesture to Howard Miller’s famous WWII “We can do it” poster (personal correspondence, 23 March 2020). The raincoat regularly appears on the many murals and graffiti paintings that can be found in cities all over the world, including major ones in Bristol (by Jody Thomas in 2019) and Istanbul (by Dheo and Pariz One in 2019). ¹ Thunberg’s use of the yellow raincoat during those rainy days in August was likely never a strategic, dramatic choice, but a practical, mundane one. That it has become such a recognizable visual prop in her iconic performance is largely the uncontrolled result of the many co-performing lay interventions that have consistently associated it with her. Thunberg has worn the coat on many subsequent protest occasions around the world. While we do not of course know the rationale behind these choices, she is likely well aware of its resonance, suggesting, again, a genuinely co-productive relationship between audience and icon.