Media and Communication (ISSN: 2183–2439) 2017, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 26–36 DOI: 10.17645/mac.v5i4.1020 Article The Visual Discourse of Protest Movements on Twitter: The Case of Hong Kong 2014 Irmgard Wetzstein Department of Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria; E-Mail: [email protected] Submitted: 3 May 2017 | Accepted: 25 September 2017 | Published: 21 December 2017 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 be- tween 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. Keywords documentary image interpretation; Hong Kong; protest movement; social media; Twitter; visual discourse Issue This article is part of the issue “Visual Communication in the Age of Social Media: Conceptual, Theoretical and Method- ological Challenges”, edited by Uta Russmann (FHWien der WKW University of Applied Sciences for Management & Com- munication, Austria) and Jakob Svensson (Malmö University, Sweden). © 2017 by the author; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1. Introduction adopting an integrated, holistic approach to disseminat- ing and receiving information (Lee & Ting, 2015). The Media scholars have been discussing the role of social Hong Kong protests highlight how digital media activi- media, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, in vari- ties are positively related to people’s involvement in the ous contexts, including protest movements, with recent protests (Lee & Chan, 2016). studies attesting to social media’s positive role in demo- This article assumes social media as assisting support- cratic engagement and its impact in supporting and even ers to spread the word (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013) participating in protest movements such as the civil dis- and to call global attention to protest movements visu- obedience movement that took place in Hong Kong from ally, when exploring the visual discourse within the Hong September to December 2014, the focus of the present Kong protests 2014, using the #hongkongprotests Twit- article (Chen, Chan, & Lee, 2016; Lee, Chen, & Chan, ter hashtag. The Hong Kong protests, also known as Um- 2017; Tufekci, 2017; Zhu, Skoric, & Shen, 2017). Findings brella Movement or Umbrella Revolution, were a civil dis- regarding the role of social media and mobile commu- obedience movement directed against the decisions of nication in the 2014 Hong Kong protests indicate that the Chinese Standing Committee of the National People’s young people, as key participants, used their media liter- Congress to reform the Hong Kong electoral system. Ac- acy skills to mobilize, organize, and initiate the protests cording to the reforms, only candidates approved by the and collective actions using not only social media and Chinese government would be allowed to present them- mobile networks but also mass media and street booths, selves for election in Hong Kong in the future. In Hong Media and Communication, 2017, Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 26–36 26 Kong, which has the status of a Special Administrative cent and unprecedented avalanche of images in popular Region and therefore some legal and political autonomy culture because of the particularly high use of mobile me- from ‘mainland’ China, those reforms were widely per- dia’ (p. 12) and explains that protest movements are not ceived as restrictions. a new phenomenon in the city due to the wide wealth The article presents the results of a documentary gap and income inequalities among its population. image interpretation, based on an understanding of vi- Without doubt, all of those studies clearly highlight suals as cultural products providing knowledge about the importance of visual images in social media and mo- the ‘world’ and generating meaning by making things bile communication in context to protest movements visible or unseen (Rose, 2012), and a concept of dis- and civic engagement. The present study aims at provid- course referring to sociology of knowledge, aiming at ing deeper insights into the visual discourse of the 2014 grasping collective knowledge repertoires, thereby us- Hong Kong protests in social media, in particular on the ing a broad understanding of knowledge including daily- micro-blogging platform Twitter, in order to derive visual life theories, internalized everyday practices, stereo- discursive strategies and the possible functioning of im- types and routines. The concept of discourse underly- ages posted on social media in context of protest move- ing the present study, inter alia, addresses thematic pat- ments, based on an in-depth study of visuals linked to terns and narrative structures forming meanings and so- the intensively used #hongkongprotests Twitter hashtag cial practices and respective power/knowledge regimes during the 2014 democratization protests in Hong Kong, (Keller, 2005, 2013; Wetzstein & Huber, 2016)—aspects focusing the following research questions derived from which, as a consequence, appear in the present study’s a perspective to discourse in the sociology of knowledge research questions. as described above: RQ1: How is the discourse of the Hong Kong protests or- 2. Literature Review and Research Questions ganized on Twitter? RQ1a: Which thematic patterns are narrated? Visual communication researchers have been manifoldly interested in protest movements. For example, based This research question focuses on the detection of visual on a content analysis of Romanian politicians’ Facebook protest narratives. Thematic patterns refer to highlighted pages, Ionescu (2013) comes to the conclusion that the topics within each visual and accompanying (written) ver- number of images used positively correlates with the bal text. Visual and verbal contents were therewith ap- public response rate. Andén-Papadopoulos (2014) es- proached as mutually dependent in terms of forming tablishes a deeper link between images and emerging the message. modes of civic engagement when protesters use the mo- RQ1b: Which actors are depicted visually? What rela- bile camera phone to record and distribute their own tions are visible among the identified actors? repression through social networks. Ekstrand and Silver (2014) emphasize the dialogic character of images es- RQ1b takes a deeper look at the visuals of interest. pecially in mobile contexts, and, dealing with mobile vi- When identifying depicted actors by name (e.g. certain sual communication as well, Villi (2007) highlights per- protest leaders or politicians) and/or role (e.g. a group petual visual contact as a capacity of the ubiquitous cam- of protesters, policemen) accompanying verbal text was era phone. used whenever it provided useful context information. Focusing on the different ways that different com- RQ1c: Which visual perspectives are used in which munities interpreted a video circulated over mainstream context? and social media showing police violence against a Hong Kong protester, Jones and Neville Chi Hang (2016) The term visual perspectives refers to the camera an- emphasize the relevance of (moving) visual images in gle and subject-camera distance. Regarding camera an- protest movements when arguing that ‘such videos serve gle, the present study distinguishes low-angle shot, neu- both as evidence of police abuses and discursive arte- tral (eye-level) shot, high-angle shot, the bird’s-eye view facts around which viewers construct bodies of shared and oblique view. The subject-camera distance and po- knowledge, attitudes and beliefs regarding events by en- sition of the camera towards actors within the image gaging in exercises of ‘collective seeing’’ (p. 567). In her frame refers to either long shots or close-ups. Referring ethnographic and visual-analytical research on camera to film studies, both, camera angles and subject-camera phone practices in Hong Kong and referring to earlier distance, promise to give further insights into the char- vernacular image making, Grace (2014) discusses the acterization of the protests in general and the actors role of the visual image in producing historical mem- in particular: While low-angle shots might be used to ory and focuses on images in the context of camera demonstrate power and a higher level of hierarchy, neu- phones as being new practices of creativity and subjec- tral shots might convey a participation in the scene to tivity distributed via social media, therewith becoming the viewer. High-angle shots might help to include a a form of everyday communication. Moreover, Grace large number of actors, and the bird’s-eye view and espe- (2014) points out Hong Kong as being ‘the ideal place cially top shots suggest collectivity, while an oblique view from which to study the significance of the relatively re-