PolarVis (“Visual persuasion in a transforming Europe: the affective and polarising power of visual content in online political discourse”) aims to shed light on the multifaceted role of visual communication in contemporary political polarisation, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of digitalised societies. It also seeks to contribute to informed public discussions on climate change and polarisation by engaging stakeholders and the public through a range of knowledge exchange activities.
There is growing concern about rising polarisation in many contemporary liberal democracies. Digitalisation is recognised as a contributing factor, making it easier for like-minded individuals to interact with one another, maintain extreme positions and engage in hostile discourses. While previous research has done in-depth work to explore digital polarisation, the visual dimension has been largely overlooked.
The collaborative research project, titled “PolarVis”, delves into the intricate dynamics of digital visual content in contemporary political life, exploring its role as both a platform to foster social connectivity and a source of manipulated communication and polarisation. At the heart of this project is an aim to understand how, why and with what consequences visual content becomes a mechanism for integration and polarisation in digitalised societies. It particularly focuses on online political discourse related to climate movements in Europe.
The research is structured around four key questions, each addressing a distinct juncture in the social and algorithmic negotiation surrounding visual communication:
- Production: how do social movements and countermovements employ visual content in their communication strategies?
- Pictures: what are the characteristics of visual content, how is it framed and what narratives emerge from it?
- Publics: what (re)actions occur around the shared visual content and how do they relate to the emergence of antagonising counterpublics?
- Propagation: how does visual content spread on online social media and what actors propagate the different narratives?
PolarVis contributes to various research areas by:
- Theoretically advancing the understanding of visual persuasion and its role in contemporary digital communication;
- Methodologically innovating by combining qualitative approaches with computational methods;
- Empirically deepening insights into (trans)national polarisation processes in Europe, particularly with regard to climate movements and countermovements.
Another important goal of the PolarVis project is to engage with various stakeholders and the general public. To achieve this, it outlines non-academic outputs, such as knowledge exchange workshops including NGOs and other local actors, guidelines on producing effective visual content, podcasts for the general public and interactive online dashboards to monitor the propagation of visual communication about climate change. PolarVis also emphasises the availability of research results, intending to maintain a comprehensive website with project outputs accessible for at least five years after its conclusion. The project commits to open access policies for research data and publications to ensure long-lasting impact.
The consortium comprises team members with diverse expertise. The role of the Centre for Social Sciences in the project is twofold: first, it records and analyses interviews with green organisations in Hungary regarding the topic of Production and second, it participates in the dissemination of the research results by producing podcasts and organising workshops.
Hungarian researchers in the consortium:
- Dániel Oross, Senior Research Fellow (TK PTI)
- Dániel Mikecz, Senior Research Fellow (TK PTI)