Abstract
The article presents the results of a qualitative documentary image interpretation of the visual discourse of the Hong Kong protests on the Twitter hashtag #hongkongprotests. Visual thematic patterns, the actors depicted, and the relations between actors as well as visual perspectives were analyzed to derive the function of visual images and to give insights into visual protest storytelling. Visuals and image-text relations in Tweets within #hongkongprotests revealed an application of images in clear favor of the protest movement taking an ‘at the scene’/‘on the ground’ perspective, with media workers being active in front of the camera rather than mere observers behind the camera. While the approach used proved to be suitable for the research project, the research design comes with some limitations, for example in terms of the non-generalizability of results.
Highlights
Media scholars have been discussing the role of social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, in various contexts, including protest movements, with recent studies attesting to social media’s positive role in democratic engagement and its impact in supporting and even participating in protest movements such as the civil disobedience movement that took place in Hong Kong from September to December 2014, the focus of the present article (Chen, Chan, & Lee, 2016; Lee, Chen, & Chan, 2017; Tufekci, 2017; Zhu, Skoric, & Shen, 2017)
The present study aims at providing deeper insights into the visual discourse of the 2014 Hong Kong protests in social media, in particular on the micro-blogging platform Twitter, in order to derive visual discursive strategies and the possible functioning of images posted on social media in context of protest movements, based on an in-depth study of visuals linked to the intensively used #hongkongprotests Twitter hashtag during the 2014 democratization protests in Hong Kong, focusing the following research questions derived from a perspective to discourse in the sociology of knowledge as described above: RQ1: How is the discourse of the Hong Kong protests organized on Twitter? RQ1a: Which thematic patterns are narrated?
Due to the non-generalizability of the results, the present results certainly need to be challenged in future research dealing with the visual discourse of other pro-democracy protest movements as well as within other Twitter hashtags or even social media services
Summary
Media scholars have been discussing the role of social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, in various contexts, including protest movements, with recent studies attesting to social media’s positive role in democratic engagement and its impact in supporting and even participating in protest movements such as the civil disobedience movement that took place in Hong Kong from September to December 2014, the focus of the present article (Chen, Chan, & Lee, 2016; Lee, Chen, & Chan, 2017; Tufekci, 2017; Zhu, Skoric, & Shen, 2017). The Hong Kong protests highlight how digital media activities are positively related to people’s involvement in the protests (Lee & Chan, 2016).
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