Contested Visual Activism: A Visual Communications Perspective of Cyber Nationalism in China
Zhou Kui is an associate professor at Faculty of Journalism and Communication, Communication University of China. Email:izhoukui@hotmail.com. Miao Weishan is an assistant professor at Institute of Journalism and Communication, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Email: weishanmiao@gmail.com.
Author information+
{{custom_zuoZheDiZhi}}
Zhou Kui is an associate professor at Faculty of Journalism and Communication,Communication University of China. Email:izhoukui@hotmail.com.
Miao Weishan is an assistant professor at Institute of Journalism and Communication, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Email: weishanmiao@gmail.com.
There has always been intimate interaction among visual text, national identity and nationalism. While the traditional academic approaches focus on the role of country, government and elites, re?ecting the control of nation nationalism, Internet leaves more space for public selfexpression and appeal expression, stimulating the emerging of public nationalism. Online visual discourse is constructed upon the cyber nationalism discourse resource from the grassroots rather than the traditional nation-state myth narrative. As there are multiple subjects in the discourse, including power relations, grassroots society and different regional groups, this construction process is combined with several new communication characteristics including visual remix, online subculture and Internet meme. This paper tries to fgure out how these multiple subjects use visual resources for contesting narrative through the viewpoint of visual communication. Inspired by the concept of image-driven nationalism, this research considers the visual text not just functions as the arouse mechanism for cyber nationalism, but also formulates the new mode of image-contesting nationalism through the dynamic production process.
ZHOU Kui, MIAO Weishan.
Contested Visual Activism: A Visual Communications Perspective of Cyber Nationalism in China. Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication. 2016, 38(11): 129-143