Activism online: Exploring how crises are communicated visually in activism campaigns

Abstract

During the past years, activist movements have increasingly turned to social media to raise awareness and critically discuss current development and future scenarios. As a contribution to the discussion of new social movements and activism in the digital age, this study aims to explore and critically discuss how environmental risks and crisis are visually communicated in activism campaigns on Instagram, through a case study on Extinction Rebellion Sweden (XRsv). The study is delimited to the first 334 posts on XRsv's Instagram between November 14, 2018 and March 1, 2020. Methods used are interview and content analysis. In conclusion, XRsv has adopted aspects of design activism including visual tactics of Informing, Activating and Explaining. These three visual aspects are used by XRsv in an online context enabling interactivity and participatory actions, which in turn forms the core of design activism.

Headline risk: Forging a crisis communication keystone

“…By comparison, crisis communication theories are well‐established but still searching for validated and replicated keystones bridging from crisis events to business outcomes. Foundational research has been built to a great extent on experimental design, content analysis, expert surveys and tabletop exercises to inform critical communication decisions about emerging risks (Sánchez & De Batista, 2023), the influence of social media (Bakker et al, 2018) and online activist groups (Fagerholm et al, 2023), messaging tactics (Soares et al, 2023), the relative effectiveness of CEOs in crisis response (Beldad & von Rosenstiel, 2023), approaches for crisis preparedness (Alinier et al, 2023), brand damage and the effectiveness of apologies (Domschat et al, 2023), and educating a future generation of crisis communicators (Petridou et al, 2023). In practice, though, PR's qualitative definition of a crisis has meant major companies have been reliant on a blend of theoretical constructs, professional experience and gut instinct to manage headline risks that can dampen consumer demand and pressure companies to lower prices to maintain market share (Nichols, 2017), cut sales in half in the immediate aftermath of the event (Wells Fargo, 2016) and in extreme cases threaten their viability as a going concern.…”