Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism

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Visuals have important added value to politicians’ Facebook posts with their more personal and emotional features, and the presence of personalization is higher in the case of politicians’ Facebook posts that contain visuals than those without visuals ( Metz et al.

The literature demonstrates that politicians use images to pursue personalization strategies on both platforms.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! Party symbols” such as colors and logos refer to the importance of the party, and thereby relate to the formal dimension. On Facebook, 51 percent of all posts included pictures, while on Instagram that proportion was 93 percent (the remaining 7 percent was video content).

By doing so, we shed light on two important dimensions of personalization: individualization and privatization. While the level of Facebook adoption was extremely high across Hungarian politicians (82 percent), Instagram use was at an early development phase (10 percent). Political Storytelling on Instagram: Key Aspects of Alexander Van Der Bellen’s Successful 2016 Presidential Election Campaign.Another major difference between the platforms is evident when we turn to the informal and formal elements of visual communication. With a particular focus on the visual dynamics of the Arab Spring, and based on case studies on the visual dimension of political protest as well as of political campaigning and image management by political parties and political leaders, Image Politics in the Middle East shows how visual expression is at the heart of political struggle in the Middle East today.

The book presents a rhetoric of the visual for our mediated age as it illuminates new political possibilities currently enacted by radical environmental groups. that visuals have a huge importance when politicians communicate with their voters, only over the past few years has more intense academic attention turned toward them in political communication. Images of migrants have been used to promote anti-immigration stances; images of homeless veterans are used to counter government policies to house refugees; images of stranded polar bears are used to promote environmental policies. Beyond the patterns of personalized communication, our results show several interesting characteristics of visual communication in general.

On one hand, we hypothesize that personalization is a prevailing and effective strategy of politicians’ visual communication. It seems that while candidates post numerous non-personalized visuals on Facebook, only the personalized ones are cross-posted on Instagram. However, as politicians are keen to apply this element in their visual communication, it is important for our coding scheme to be able to capture it. At the time of the data collection, the access to collect data from public Facebook pages was not limited or restricted.