What is PolarVis all about?
PolarVis addresses the relationship between two pressing phenomena: networked visual persuasion and societal polarisation. Online communication is increasingly ‘visual first’, and images, videos, and memes are powerful in focusing attention, carrying meaning, and emotion. How societal actors use visuals to persuade can significantly shape ideas about us, them, the big issues of our time – and about the very existence of dangerous divides. The visual dimension is an area of political life that is increasingly salient. Until recently, it has been difficult to study at social media scale.
PolarVis aimed to understand how, why, and with what consequences visual content becomes a mechanism of integration and polarisation in digitalized societies. The project studied online political discourse in and around movements for and against a contested issue – climate action – in Europe. It analysed four key communication junctures and the interaction between them: (1) How climate (counter)movements use visuals in their communication repertoires; (2) The characteristics of climate visuals with respect to themes, frames and narratives; (3) How online audiences react, and how antagonistic and affective (counter)publics emerge, and (4) How such content, and associated affect, spreads across groups and social media platforms. To this end, the consortium brought together a unique interdisciplinary framework that integrates qualitative approaches, network analysis, and computational text and image analysis in pursuit of the project objectives. The project team interviewed strategic communicators; used visual content analysis techniques to understand repertoires and themes; and investigated processes of integration and polarisation in the emotions around and sharing of such content within and between groups. To fill a gap in the study of online visual political communication, the team developed and applied novel methods to capture meaningful visual topics and the associated patterns of polarisation and affect.
PolarVis shows how visual content can become a focal point for connection and conflict, and how strategic communicators and individual social media users may deliberately or unwittingly engage in polarising processes. The findings confirm that visual content spreads faster, wider, and with more intense affective reactions than other types of content on social media. However, high drama and emotions are not winning strategies for all. The findings also show that online communication about climate issues is characterised by diverging and asymmetrically affective visual landscapes. Connections run across borders rather than climate ideological divides. Visual repertoires that cue credibility for some shift to distrust, oppositional reaction, and re-framing for others.
PolarVis findings illuminate the online visual dimension of societal polarisation, and dilemmas facing stakeholders trying to engage citizens with contentious issues such as climate change. Deeply diverging affective visual landscapes can play a role in perceived polarisation. They can also challenge persuasion that requires credibility and trust, and ultimately the conditions for meaningful democratic contestation. Beyond its basic research, PolarVis developed tools to help stakeholders and citizens perceive the dynamics involved. The project thereby offers a more comprehensive basis from which to negotiate a visual terrain that can divide but also connect.