Media, Mobilization and the Umbrella Movement

Francis L. F. Lee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138223097
• eBook ISBN: 9781315405889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong caught the world's attention and imagination at the end of 2014. The 79-day occupation campaign took on some of the characteristics of the recent wave of large-scale protest movements around the world, including the prominent roles played by the media – both conventional and digital – in the mobilization and communication processes of the movement.

This edited volume, Media, Mobilization and the Umbrella Movement, brings together nine contributions which examine various aspects of the media-movement nexus, including the power of televised images to mobilize people, the role of social media in the insurgent public sphere, young activists' social media strategies, media influence on citizens' understanding of civil disobedience, the government's response to digital media tactics, public discourses about the rule of law, and local and foreign media coverage of the movement. We believe that this high-quality collection can not only enhance our understanding of the Umbrella Movement, but also facilitate and trigger more research and dialogue comparing the Umbrella Movement with other similar protest movements around the world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Chinese Journal of Communication.

Mobilization by images: TV screen and mediated instant grievances in the Umbrella Movement

Gary Tang

School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This article discusses the effects of the televised images of the use of tear gas on people participating in the Umbrella Movement. Although the role of the Internet and social media in political mobilization has been widely discussed, the importance of television cannot be overlooked. This article argues that the widely transmitted broadcasts of live images of the police firing tear gas into the protesting crowd generated “mediated instant grievances” in a substantial sector of the viewing public, thus contributing to the size and scale of the Umbrella Movement. The study reported here provides evidence for this argument by analyzing the results of a survey of protesters that were on site during the early stage of the movement (N = 969). The study sought to determine whether and how the television images were related to the participants’ political attitudes, reasons for participation, and views of self-mobilized actions. The findings showed that, in particular, mediated instant grievances motivated the participation of the “amateur protesters” in the movement.

Introduction

Much recent research and discussion on the effects of media on social movements has focused on digital and social media. However, television remains a prominent medium in most contemporary societies. In Hong Kong, television has been crucial in the formation of local identity (Ma, 1998). Historically, the intensive live coverage of many important incidents has shaped people’s emotional reactions to events and their collective memories (Chan & Lee, 2010; Ma, 2010). This article contends that in the Umbrella Movement, television played a crucial role in mobilizing the participants and contributing to the scale of the occupation.

A brief account of the beginning of the movement highlights the plausibility of television’s effects on mobilization. On the night of 27 September 2014, and after a week of class boycott, student groups protested outside the Central Government Office (CGO). Scholarism, one of the major student groups that had organized the protests, suddenly mobilized the participants to rush into the “Civic Square”, an area in front of the East Wing of the CGO, which used to be an open space but had been fenced to prevent public access since early September 2014. Physical conflict between the students and the police occurred. The television news showed screenshots of the police removing the protesting students from the Civic Square with seemingly excessive force. Enraged by the police’s violent actions, more people went to the CGO on September 27 and joined the protest.

The unexpected development of this situation compelled the proponents of Occupy Central to declare the beginning of the occupation, which was originally scheduled to begin on 1 October, in the early morning hours of 28 September. In the early afternoon of that day, tens of thousands of citizens hoped to join or support the protest near the CGO (Apply Daily, 2014). However, the police blocked the major routes to the CGO area. As more and more citizens arrived, the sidewalks became increasingly overcrowded. Some protesters finally breached the police’s blockade line and rushed into Harcourt Road, a main road in the Central Business District (CBD) of Hong Kong. The traffic on Harcourt Road was thus blocked, and the inadvertent occupation of the main roads began.

Around 6 pm, the police shot tear gas to disperse the crowd. The use of tear gas arguably shocked the whole society. The use of tear gas is a rare event in Hong Kong, and the firing of tear gas in the urban landscape of the city’s CBD created spectacular images. These images were immediately transmitted to citizens’ private homes via television. Throughout the day, 24-hour news channels had been transmitting live broadcasts of the protests.

Nevertheless, the use of tear gas failed to end the protest. Instead, it motivated even more people to participate. In addition to the Admiralty business district, the traffic nodes of two other urban districts – Causeway Bay and Mongkok – were also occupied that night. In news reports, some protesters claimed that they had not intended to join the protest until the police fired tear gas (Apple Daily, 2014, September 30). In other words, the police’s actions provoked them to participate in the protest. However, their actions probably would not have had a “mobilizing impact” without the presence of television. Hence, it is also appropriate to say that the television images motivated more people to join the protest.

However, how representative were the anecdotal cases shown in the news media? That is, did the television images of tear gas motivate a significant proportion of protesters to join the Umbrella Movement? Moreover, if a substantial proportion of protesters were indeed motivated by the television images of tear gas, did they have the same set of political beliefs as the other protesters? In addition, while the role of digital and social media is in contemporary large-scale protests has been widely acknowledged (Valenzuela, Arriagada, & Scherman, 2012; Tufekci & Wilson, 2012), what roles did these media play in motivating users to join the protest?

This article tackles these questions through analyzing the data collected from a survey of protesters at the occupied area. The answers to these questions should help us better understand not only the onset of the Umbrella Movement, but also the potential of televised images for the mobilization of large-scale social protests. The next section will examine the mobilizing power of television by discussing the concepts of the public screen and mediated instant grievances.

Public screen and mediated instant grievances

The influence of television on social change is often seen as negative. In addition to the argument by technological determinists that the medium of television discourages people from the rational and in-depth discussion of political affairs (Postman, 1985), other early television studies doubted the extent to which television content represents social reality. In their early studies, Gerbner and colleagues argued that television discourages audiences from seeking social change. The medium serves to maintain the status quo by cultivating distorted worldviews (Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Gerbner, Gross, Jackson-Beeck, Jeffries-Fox, & Signorielli, 1978). From a political economic perspective, the institutional collaboration between broadcasters and commercial corporations is a basic concern. Given the high operational costs and the oligopolistic market structure, the TV industry tends to cater to the interests of corporations (Herman & Chomsky, 1988). Where the coverage of social movements and collective actions is concerned, the result is the phenomenon of the “protest paradigm” (Chan & Lee, 1984); that is, the tendency of television news to portray protests and protesters as deviant, violent, and dangerous. Empirical research has indeed shown that audiences exposed to news about protests that was framed according to the protest paradigm were more critical of the protesters (McLeod, 1995; McLeod & Detenber, 1999).

In contrast to the negative effects of television, DeLuca and Peeples (2002) conceptualized the power of television as promoting public criticism and resistance by delivering images based on the concept of the “he d on the c”. Focusing on the case of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, they argued that the uncivil disobedience of the anarchists led to violent conflict with the police, the visual images of which were widely circulated in the media. The images consequently dominated the news agenda, thus allowing the protest and the violent conflict to define the entire WTO Conference. The images also became discursive materials for aligning various anti-WTO parties with the anti-globalization protests from that point.

Although DeLuca and Peeples (2002) included many kinds of pictorial images – television, computer, and the front pages and photos in newspapers – in their concept of the public screen, television was given a prominent place in their discussion. Theoretically, they argued that the widespread circulation of “screens” entails a new kind of relationship between news information and politics, which the conventional idea of the public sphere does not capture:

we cannot simply adopt the term “public sphere” and all it entails, a term indebted to orality and print, for the current screen age. The new term takes seriously the work of media theorists suggesting that new technologies introdu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Media Communication and the Umbrella Movement
• 1. Mobilization by images: TV screen and mediated instant grievances in the Umbrella Movement
• 2. Social media and Umbrella Movement: insurgent public sphere in formation
• 3. Media and information praxis of young activists in the Umbrella Movement
• 4. Social movement as civic education: communication activities and understanding of civil disobedience in the Umbrella Movement
• 5. A legal realist view on citizen actions in Hong Kong’s umbrella movement
• 6. Contested news values and media performance during the Umbrella Movement
• 7. Business as usual: the UK national daily press and the Occupy Central movement
• 8. The coming colonization of Hong Kong cyberspace: government responses to the use of new technologies by the umbrella movement
• 9. Yellow or blue ribbons: analysing discourses in conflict in the televized government-student meeting during the Occupy Movement in Hong Kong
• Index