Media Use and Protest Mobilization: A Case Study of Umbrella Movement Within Hong Kong Schools

Abstract

This study aims to examine the roles of social media in protest mobilization through the case of Umbrella Movement. Instead of focusing in the occupied sites, the study chose to look at mobilization efforts and confrontations within Hong Kong secondary schools. In-depth interviews were conducted with 14 students, teachers and principals from four schools, with an aim to identify how members in schools used different media for information sharing, opinion expression and mobilization. It also reconstructed what actually occurred in the tactful negotiations between school authorities and student leaders during the movement. The findings of this study suggest that how different communication practices are mediated in particular social and cultural contexts remain to be relevant and important, as the stress on "harmony" in local education settings illustrate in this case study. The strong adherence to political neutrality and professionalism suggest that schools could hardly provide the kind of idealistic civic education stated in curriculum documents. The findings prompted for a critical reading of how apolitical civic education in Hong Kong schools constrained a social movement that was supposedly led by the youth.

Data Activism: Reviving, Extending and Upgrading Critical Citizenship Education and Consumer Rights Movements

“…Converging with this, Chu (2018) points out the disconnect between the official citizenship education and students' online and offline activism within the context of Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement. While the former is apolitical and bookish, the latter involves alternative accounts of political events.…”

Assessing the Impact of Digital Alternative News Media in a Hybrid News Environment: Cases from Taiwan and Hong Kong

“…Their uses in social movements could be simplistically summarized into two types: as instruments of communication and as social spaces of identity and community formation (Nip 2004). As instruments of communication, digital media technologies help social movements in spreading information (Barberá et al 2015b;Chiu and Hsu 2017;Tufekci and Wilson 2012), networking (Juris 2012;Zhang and Lee 2018), coordination (Wilson and Dunn 2011), and mobilization (Bastos et al 2015;Chen et al 2015;Chu 2018;Tang 2015;Vasi and Suh 2016). Among them, the informational function is the most elemental, which underlies the other instrumental functions.…”

Disciplining Student Activism: Secondary Schools as Sites of Resistance and Control in Hong Kong*

“…Another was the advancement and popularization of social networking technology, a more global phenomenon. As "digital natives," secondary school students are proficient users of social media, which enable them to easily take part in social mobilization (Chu 2018).…”

“…This tension is particularly salient in non-democratic contexts, in which schools are usually more conservative and are expected to serve as bulwarks against any tendency of disobedience against the existing order. Yet, despite a rich corpus of literature on how authoritarian governments regulate education systems (Abens 2015;Koesei 2020) and how students organize protests in these contexts (Ancelovici and Guzman-Concha 2019;Chu 2018), the role of schools in handling student activism is often neglected.…”