In the age of social media, social movements are increasingly showing the complexities of linkage between online and offline modes. For China, the Internet industry is highly developed. Under the 'one country, two systems' policy, the social movements in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region are more complicated. The 'Occupy Central with Love and Peace'movement in Hong Kong has passed now, but the Hong Kong problem is far from being solved. Nowadays, the 'Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement' movement has become another climax of Hong Kong's social movements. So, what are the characteristics of social movements under the catalysis of social media? And what influence do these characteristics have on the effects of social movements?
The article takes the 'Occupy Central with Love and Peace' movement in Hong Kong as the research object, supplemented by the 'Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement' movement as comparison.Based on the framework of collective action and connective action, this article analyzes the impact of social media use on social movements, thus explores the characteristics of social movements in the age of social media.
Through research work, we found that the social movements in Hong Kong have a mixed attribute of collective action and connective action. For collective action, the social media has played a role in gathering resources, releasing information and increasing influence. For connective action, the social media has constructs a space of online and offline modes integration, making the movements have the characteristics of strong flexibility and high personal participation, but there are also problems of conflicts within the group. However, the nature of the 'Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement' movement has undergone a new shift.Its nature is integrated into the connective movement of tissue stimulation mode from the previous dual attributes mixed nature.
The result of the research show that in the current social movements in Hong Kong, the social movement organizations still play the role of initiators, but the social media has replaced the roles of leaders and organizers in the traditional social movement organizations, which leads to the social movements increasingly relying on the individual action framework that are not normatively regulated. This loose social movement paradigm, on the one hand, expands the scale of the social movements, and at the same time makes the organization more hidden, which make it possible for the organization network to avoid the risk of being concentrated attacked by the government. However, on the other hand, the situation of lacking for representative roles also makes the government lose the object of dialogue.The demands of the protesters are difficult to be effectively unified and responded to, and their movement may be stuck into a deadlock of internal resource consumption for a long time, which will not be helpful to solve the problem.The absence of the core organizer also causes the violent conflicts between the members of the movement and the police in the absence of legitimacy discussion, which results in the disorder of social order and the makes the legitimacy of the movement in crisis.