Assessment of Media Influence on the Intensity of Participation in the Environmental Movements: The Case of Nature Cleaners Movement

Social movements are considered as a source of transformations in different societies. The global trend of environmental degradation has highlighted the importance of understanding the environmental movements. In this study, we firstly, try to present contextual Characteristics of one of the emerging environmental movements in Iran, secondly to evaluate the level of using different news sources among participants and finally to assess media usage influence on the intensity of participation in the Nature Cleaners movement (NCm). In this vein, we conducted a survey across the Iran in a two months period. We applied both structured interviewing and distributing questionnaires methods to gather data from 261 cases in ten various areas. Our results rejected applying the mass society theory to explain NCm. In addition, the findings demonstrated that online social networks are most used, as well as the most influential news source among other Medias. In the rest of paper, the influence of other kinds of used news sources was evaluated and finally suggestions for the future research were provided.