Placing the Umbrella: an imagined community created from the integration of the online and offline

Abstract

‘Imagined Community’ (Anderson 1983) offers a precise and convenient concept for explaining processes of community formation within integrated online-offline spaces. However, two pressing questions remain: how is the integration of the online and offline experienced, and how does such experience contribute to a sense of community. In short, how are these communities imagined through and within the online-offline spatial integration. This paper seeks to contribute to the unfolding of the tangled concepts of ‘imagination’ and the onlineoffline. The paper engages the puzzle through the case of the territorialization process at the early stage of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, 2014 (hereafter the Movement). In considering the integration of the physical space, embodied space and online space, the paper references a multimodal analytic approach (cf. Thurlow and Jaworski 2014), addressing the interactions between these distinct but mutually complementing layers of spaces in creating Movement’s territory. Juxtaposing images and videos of on-site activities to posts on a local forum, HKGolden.com, during the ‘Take Back Civic Square Operation’ (26th Sept 2014), the paper explores the ‘doubling of place’ (Moores 2004) in the Movement. Through an analysis of the intertextuality and co-temporality between the on-site and online discourse, the paper argues that the individual’s “possibilities of being: of being in two places at once,” (Scannell 1997, p. 173) is a simultaneously a cause and a product of the online-offline integration. Considering such integrated space as a ‘lived space’ (Lefebvre 1991), the paper argues that the ‘imagination’ involved, in contrast to a social constructionist viewpoint, begins from the individual instead of the social structure (cf. Fox 2004). The presentation consists of three sections: 1) a review of the literature on spatialization and onlineoffline space, 2) an introduction to the ‘new imagined community’, and 3) an analysis of observations relating to and constituting the Operation on September 26, 2014.