Networked activists and the movement for democracy in Hong Kong

The Umbrella Movement was arguably the largest and longest episode of collective contention in the history of Hong Kong, where political activism for democracy surged when a conservative reform to Hong Kong's electoral system was announced by the mainland Chinese government in late August 2014. Whereas Hong Kong lacks the tradition of radical protests, the Umbrella Movement enjoyed considerable public support, especially amongst the networked individuals whose everyday activities and social relations are intimately rooted in their new media usages. Drawing on in-depth interviews, online ethnography, and archival research, this research examines how the digitally-enabled individuals, who operated outside social movement organizations and political interest groups, came to engage in and sustain the Umbrella Movement. In particular, by integrating Actor-Network Theory and performance studies into social movement and Internet research, it submits a post-structuralist, practice-oriented approach to study how the individual citizens initiated their political activism, how they came together and acted in concert throughout the seventy-nine days, and how their movement involvement interacted with their everyday routines and relations, facilitated by the use of social media and digital technologies. Throughout this research, I contend that the digitally-enabled individuals' networked activism emerged and evolved as on-going processes of socio-material assemblages, in which the people's activist identity and political action arose within sets of situated, social-technological practices. This research has significant implications for the study of contemporary networked social movements. First, moving away from the common focus on the technical capacity of new media technology, it proposes the concept of hybrid contentious practices to look at how networked activists combine and switch between on- and offline spheres of action, as opposed to the general role of the Internet and its unidirectional impact on collective action. Second, this research orients our attention toward the larger historical-material contexts of and immediate encounters in protest movements, through which the individuals' political subjectivity and activity develop and alter. Lastly, this research transcends the long-standing scholarly divide by showing how people's contentious-political identity and action are simultaneously and mutually constitutive in the unfolding processes of performative doing.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Ting, Tin Yuet

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bayat, Asef
• McDermott, Monica
• Denzin, Norman K.
• Schulz, Markus S

• Digital Media
• Hong Kong
• Networked Activism
• Occupation
• Social Media
• Social Movements

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2016 Tin-yuet Ting

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90796

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/90796