Football is a sport that is played and followed globally. In the 1990s, football also was surrounded by a distinctive formation of fictive, autobiographical and other texts in which the sport plays a crucial role. This phenomenon has been dubbed New Football Writing. The texts represent football as a sort of a tabula rasa: through football writing a conspicuous number of different meanings is articulated with the game. It is, however, characteristic of the texts analysed in this article that they defend the old working class public, i.e. they nostalgically yearn for the old, authentic football as the “religion of the working class”. A yen for the authentic is a yen for something “solid”: stable identities, harmonious worldview, familiar community and culture.

Climate change has recently emerged as the key policy concern, and climate issues have been highlighted by the media as well. This article focuses on the public Internet-based debate over the results of climate science. More specifically, the focus is on the use of comical argumentation as a tool to downplay the views of other actors in web debates. The results suggest that the use of comical and humorous argumentation is a key factor undermining the ability of the web discussion platforms to function as forums for constructive knowledge sharing and social learning. Ecological irony is proposed as a possible approach that may facilitate social learning.

Translated by the authors