Pictorial Poaching And Différance Of The Meanings

The rise of the Internet leads to the empowerment of the communication and theaccess to new media, which make the agents who join the online activism create moreand more new ways to express themselves and motivate the others to join the socialmovement. And the Internet image is just one of those new ways. In the online activisms,such as ‘the Southern Weekend Strike’and so on, happened in recent years, the Internetimages have been utilized by the netizens to express themselves. Obviously, Internetimages are of great importance to us nowadays.The traditional Internet Studies invariably focus on the text or the people in thisInternet public sphere, and lay less emphasis on the images produced by the netizens.Based on the perspective of the cultural study and the visual communication, this paperwill take the ‘Big Love’ Gay Rights Online Activism happened in the January,2013asthe study case. Then, the paper discussed the change happened to the Internet imagesproduced by the agents in terms of visual analysis. And at the same time, under theguidance of the grounded theory, this paper analyzed the online in-depth interviews onthe actors in this online activism, and discussed the interaction between the agents andthe Internet Images.The paper deems that Internet images, which were produced during the early stage ofthis online activism, were involved with the political meanings. But as the time went by,the political meaning has experienced the difference, which is a process of the vanishingof the meanings, when the pictorial poaching, which is a process of shaping the agents’indentity, happened to the Internet Images. The political meaning of the Internet imageshas disappeared during its Internet meme communication in this online activism.What’s more, what we should be remind of is that although the pictorial poachinghas made the motivation of the social movement more effective, it may make the wholeonline activism be more like a entertainment. We should lay more emphasize on the badaffect, which is of great importance to the new social movements, especially the gayrights movements.