Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism

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On Facebook, 51 percent of all posts included pictures, while on Instagram that proportion was 93 percent (the remaining 7 percent was video content). Just think of the iconic image of the “tank man”, a lone protester standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989. In general, we expect that both privatization and individualization can be effectively pursued by visual communication on social media. It should be top of the agenda on the AI risk register with two major elections – in the UK and the US – looming large next year.

Text carries additional information beyond the pictures in almost half of the posts on Facebook, while on Instagram it usually only accompanies pictures without any meaningful contribution. Facebook posts were collected by using the Python-based Facebook-page-post-Scraper package (see https://github.

When text is added to the post, visuals appear below it, suggesting it is more of an illustration to the textual message. The book is full of interesting and useful information--for instance Abbie Hoffman's realization in the 60s of the power of the televised image and the later 'yippie' connection to Earth First!

The aim of the inductive analysis was to formulate categories that describe the images in a detailed way and find the most appropriate groups of categories that help investigate as many aspects of the image as possible. For Levin, “the channeled image” names a constellation of practices that mimic, simulate, or disrupt the appearance of televised images. By images, we refer only to still images; consequently moving images—such as videos or GIFs—are excluded from our analysis due to their different visual nature that requires different methods of analysis. presents a detailed analysis of the use of video images to advancethe objectives of activist organizations ranging from little-known groups like the Allegheny County Non-violent Action Group to the internationally recognizable Earth First!Formal and informal elements of visual communication are identified by inductive content analysis discussed in the “Method” section. As for the role of visual communication, on Facebook it is a widely used tool, although it is only one of several forms of communication.

But while such tactics can mobilize supporters, manage impressions, and amplify political messages, it also means political campaigns become more superficial.An image is the candidate’s own content if it has been taken by the candidate or his or her staff, and the candidate shares it as his or her own content that is usually related to the campaign or the candidate’s daily calendar.

Image Politics shows how the earth itself is given voice--a multiplicity of voices, actually--as environmentalists, capitalists, and the press do battle in the public square. Shweta Singh, an assistant professor of information systems and management at the University of Warwick, said: “We need a set of ethical principles which can assure and reassure the users of these new technologies that the news they are reading is trustworthy.Compared with written or spoken texts, people tend to believe more what they see, and visuals are easier to remember because they can transmit more specific messages that are more difficult to grasp in verbal communication ( Grabe and Bucy 2009).