Managing the power of images: Environmental NGOs, networked public screens, and ‘interactive’ image events in China

Abstract

Scholars have researched the ‘wildness’ or ‘tameness’ of public screens for staging image events. This study argues that in non-democratic contexts, public screens are not totally wild or tame but are constrained by institutional limits, straddling the tame and the wild. In networked public screens, activists should keep a careful balance between tameness and wildness, staging ‘interactive’ image events to conduct bottom–up social mobilization to pressure the local state while avoiding being perceived as a threat. Through a case study of environmental activism in China, we identified two interactive strategies that were organized around image events. One was a visible interaction through which activists manipulated the mediated visibility of environmental problems by constructing image events. The other was an invisible interplay through which states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in closed-door negotiations to solve the problems exposed, without relinquishing the potential for social mobilization by constructing image events. These two forms of interactions, visible and invisible, form a circuit and are interconvertible in specific situations. With the shrinking of institutional space, invisible interaction is becoming the dominant mode of interaction with the state. The formation of such an interactive circuit has largely constrained the power of environmental images in social mobilization.