Social media have been widely credited for facilitating young people’s political engagement, most notably by providing a conducive platform for political expression. There has been comparatively little attention, however, to the possible pitfalls for young people when they engage in politics on social media. In this study, we seek to redress the overemphasis on the strengths and connectivity of social media by attending to how young people negotiate their drawbacks and disconnectivity. Through in-depth interviews with young participants of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, we examine the choices and motives regarding mediated (non-)participation among a group of politically active youths. Our findings revealed that these young people’s social media ambivalence emerged from the major participatory experience. Despite their active and open informational sharing and political expression on social media alongside their in-person participation during the eventful protest, many young participants became wary of such expressive use owing to their perceptions of de-energization, disconnectedness, and disembodiment. Instead of completely withdrawing from political activities on social media, these politically inclined and technologically savvy youths embraced “disconnective practices” – passive engagement (lurking), selective expression (moderation and exposure- limitation), and offline participation (embodied collective action) – to avoid the overwhelming, fractious, and inauthentic conditions of mediated participation.

Despite the concern that partisan selectivity in the political use of social media leads to mass polarization, the empirical evidence is mixed at best. Given the possibility that these inconclusive findings are attributable to moderators in the process that have not been adequately studied, this article elaborates the roles played by different forms of social identities. By analyzing three datasets collected in Hong Kong, where Chinese and Hong Kongese identities are constructed in a nonmutually exclusive way, this study demonstrates that (1) partisan selectivity in media use is reliably detected among those with single Hong Kongese identity, but not among those with dual identities of Hong Kongese and Chinese, (2) the political use of social media polarizes the attitudes and affects of single identifiers, whereas it has depolarizing effects on dual identifiers, and (3) these contrasting effects on polarization between single and dual identifiers have downstream consequences for political participation.

Using Hong Kong and Shenzhen in a comparative case study, this article addresses two important questions about digital governance: what its development sequence is, and the governance role of social media in the Chinese context. A content analysis is performed of social media communication by four sets of comparable agencies in the two
cities, using the framework of e-government interconnectivity. Contrary to general expectations, our findings show that Shenzhen was more active than Hong Kong in the governmental use of social media. The results also suggest that, against the normative and sequential models, there is no strict sequence or particular order of development that must be followed in digital governance, thus rejecting the stage-by-stage “walk before you run” hypothesis. A government can “leapfrog” or “run before it walks” in its digital governance, bypassing earlier stages of development. Furthermore, the study shows that digital governance is an important tool of institutional adaptation and development to enhance a government’s ability to respond to a dynamic environment of raising citizen expectations. State-led digitalization complements and compensates for the traditional and formal citizen–government interaction mechanisms, making offline and online institutions interchangeable and substitutable, and therefore also more interrelated and indistinguishable.

This article explores recent changes in Hong Kong’s independent documentary filmmaking during a decade of escalating protests in the territory, focusing in particular on cinema’s role in Hong Kong’s “movement field.” It focuses on Ying E Chi, an important distributor and promoter of Hong Kong independent films, the annual Hong Kong Independent Film Festival it organizes, and three recent documentaries it distributes that are relevant to the 2019–2020 protests. Drawing on participant observation at film screenings, interviews with filmmakers and textual analysis, the author argues that independent documentaries function in Hong Kong’s “movement field” in three main ways: by contributing to and providing a space for civic discourse, by facilitating international advocacy and by engaging in memory work. Its contributions to civic culture, it asserts, are reflected in the films’ observational aesthetic, which invites reflection and discussion. Public screenings and lengthy post-screening discussions are important ways in which these functions are realized.