Comunicar Journal Blog

Facebook to build an informed community

In a lately meeting, Facebook announced to media practitioners that they would do their part to elevate media literacy by means of supplying tools and training to journalists.

At first glance, Facebook’s move is shocking, or at least confusing as we all know that Facebook is the platform where all sorts of information got spread/viral. To ensure freedom of expression and to do its business well, Facebook has no reason to select/censor/filter contents from users of various backgrounds. After all, Facebook is no more than a commercial organization based on “contents”. In my view, it is debatable that how Facebook shall position itself on this issue. However, for better or not, a healthier and fairer media eco-system is beneficial to the whole society, as long as Facebook provides media literacy tools rather than be the “tool” itself.

During the Facebook meeting, ways of engaging in media literacy are introduced, though a lot more moves are still at their preliminary phase. Third party experts are of great importance to this emerging literacy project. Experts in various fields are invited to join force to conduct situation analysis. In Hong Kong, Facebook partners with the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

The media literacy project by Facebook leaves a few concerns, in another word, new challenges: shall we re-define news/journalism again? When Facebook, the largest social media in the world claims to do “journalism” as well, what shall we expect from Facebook-style journalism and journalistic journalism? In addition, as the “third party” mechanism acclaimed by Facebook represents the “independence” and “fairness” which are complied with traditional journalism spirit, does it mean that this “third party” equals to “objectivity”?

When the boundary between online and offline world blurs more and more, it is an urge for us, as researcher, educator and citizen, to re-think “news”.

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Call for abstract: Media Education Summit 2018, Hong Kong

Date: November 1-2, 2018
Venue: Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), Hong Kong
Conference Website: https://cemp.ac.uk/summit/2018/

About the Conference:
Each year the Media Education Summit (MES) is held in a different country. It
brings together a global network of media educators and media literacy
practitioners to share research, pedagogy and innovation in all aspects of media
literacy education and media technology education. In 2018, the MES will be held
in Hong Kong. The School of Communication at HKBU will co-organize the
MES with the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP) of Bournemouth
University, UK.
This international conference will be one of the key events to mark the 50 th
Anniversary of the School of Communication at HKBU.
MES is convened annually by the CEMP and now is a global event, hosted in
Prague in 2014, Boston in 2015, Rome in 2016 and Segovia in 2017. In 2018,
MES will be held in Asia for the first time.
Media and information literacy (MIL) and media technology education have
become essential life skills in the emerging knowledge society. Educators around
the world are developing innovative media education programs for the youth.
Moreover, the field of media literacy has become a distinct academic field of
study. This conference will provide an opportunity for media literacy and media
education researchers and practitioners to exchange views across disciplines and
cultures on the latest developments in the field.

Abstract submission: https://cemp.ac.uk/summit/2018/

Deadline of submission: April 30, 2018

Participatory media and change of teaching method

In the latest issue of Comunicar, a theme that has received intensive discussion in the recent decade leads a series of research articles: Shared science and knowledge, Open access, technology and education.

Among the serial articles, one of them draws my special attention: Soler-Adillon, J., Pavlovic, D. & Freixa, P. (2018). Wikipedia in higher education: Changes in perceived value through content contribution. Comunicar, 54, 39-48. Given to the prevalence of wikipedia in our daily internet use as well as in academia practice, the authors conducted experiments that compared how students perceive the reliability and usefulness, and of likeliness of finding false information on Wikipedia. A significant change of perception on the above aspects was found before and after students got a chance to edit contents on wikipedia. Their appreciation of the task of writing Wikipedia articles, in terms of it being interesting and challenge also increased.

This article stimulates my further contemplation on one of the latest fashion in teaching method: flipped classroom. Recently, I attended a workshop organized by universities in Hong Kong. In the workshop, concepts and practical experience regarding this teaching method was introduced. Basically, the rationale behind is that, students in today’s digital age have mastered various means of knowledge acquisition, especially with the assistance of the internet. Therefore, the role of teacher shall be transformed from instructor to coach/tutor. And the function of classroom shall be more for discussion than for one-way lecturing. Participatory platforms such as MOOC, Moodle and to name a few should play a leading role in the process of education because students living in the digital age shall be more interested in and inclined to interactive two-way communication. Wikipedia, in this regard, is a vivid example and exemplar of participatory media. Shall it be a primary means in university teaching? Or, when students are told to search information on their own, how to guarantee the quality of knowledge they have “acquired”?

Besides the primary and ultimate issue of “how to stimulate students’ self-learning motivation”, media and information is of particular importance in this regard. In the previous blog entry, Prof. Alice Lee addressed: media and Information Literacy (MIL) are the combined capabilities of Media Literacy, Information Literacy and ICT. It means to search, evaluate, use and create media messages and information efficiently from any platform (Internet, media, library, museum, database, etc.).

Teaching is never a problem of teaching method, in my view. In the old days, as long as students are highly self-motivated, traditional teaching methods such as one-way lecturing or multi-way communication in seminar, deliver knowledge and stimulate new thoughts effectively. Great thinkers learn in libraries, classrooms, reading clubs and on their owns, instead of on MOOC or Moodle. Vice versa, without strong and critical media and information literacy and embracing little self-motivation, students, even given a large variety of learning options, will fail to receive high-quality education.

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Media and Information Literacy: Critical Minds for Critical Times

     The Internet and digital technologies have rapidly developed in recent years. The cutting-edge communications technologies have brought a lot of convenience to human societies, but in the past few years they have fueled misinformation, fake news, political propaganda, hate speech and commercial fraudulent manipulation. Social networking sites have trapped Netizens in the echo chamber, causing polarization in public opinion and creating social rips. The world has rapidly marched into the so-called “post-truth era.” If these problems are not solved, the situation may deteriorate further as we step into the “all Internet world.”

     It is no wonder that UNESCO raised the emergency slogan “Critical Minds for Critical Times,” urging the media to play a role of building a peaceful, just and inclusive society and holding the “Media and Information Literacy and Cross-Strait Initiative (MILID) on the theme “Media and Information Literacy in Critical Times: Re-Imagining Ways of Learning and Information Environments” (UNESCO, 2017). Global media educators need to explore ways to use different approaches to media and information literacy education (MIL Education) in a variety of settings. About 200 media literacy and information literacy experts, coming from 40 countries, gathered in Jamaica by the end of 2017 to exchange views on this important issue.

At present, all walks of life have tried their best to prevent the false news from spreading. In some countries, the government considered legislation and criminalized the delivery of false news. However, some scholars worry that doing so would undermine freedom of speech. The other is to call for media and social networking sites to step up self-regulation, with Facebook and Google promising to take counter-measures on counterfeit news, but seeming no success and their sincerity being questioned. Some news agencies set up a verification team to verify the news, but need to use a lot of human resources. It is then believed that the more effective way to fight against fake news is to educate the audiences. MIL education should be able to cultivate media-and-information-literate citizens and contribute to the battle against misinformation and fake news.

Media and Information Literacy (MIL) are the combined capabilities of Media Literacy, Information Literacy and ICT. It means to search, evaluate, use and create media messages and information efficiently from any platform (Internet, media, library, museum, database, etc.).

In the post-truth era, MIL educators encourages young people to be responsible global citizens. New technologies have improved human livelihood and built smart cities. But there are also many negative effects that threaten the well-being of humankind and bring modern society to a “critical time.” How could we free the “all Internet world” from chaos in information in the future? It is believed that MIL advocates need to continue their efforts globally.

Composed by

Prof. Alice Lee, Professor and Department Head

Department of Journalism, Hong Kong Baptist University

Jamaica conference

Critical Citizenship and Social Empowerment

The latest issue of Comunicar (Vol. XXV, n. 53, 4th quarter, October 1 2017) (https://www.grupocomunicar.com/index.php?contenido=revista&numero=53) sheds lights on one of the most popular topics in nowadays academia – cyber activism and empowerment. A meta-analysis leads four specific empirical studies based in different nations and regions.

In the past decade, along with the global uprising cases is the blossom of research on social activism that is inevitably intertwined with communication studies. Obviously, the prevalence of digital-aided communication tools has played an essential role not only in protesting activities, but in most areas of human social life. Use of digital media enlarges scale and transforms essence of social occurrences: the speed and scale of mass communication has been significantly heightened so that attentions on certain events have been broadened from local to global range; the breaking-out, mobilization and sustaining of social protests have been changed by people’s use of digital media. “Connective action” suggested by Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg offers an innovative paradigm to refresh our understanding on how human actions could be connected with each other. (https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Connective-Action-Personalization-Contentious/dp/1107642728)

In this current issue, papers such as “Cyberactivisim in the Process of Political and Social Change in Arab Countries” and “Protesting on Twitter: Citizenship and Empowerment from Public Education” prove the prevalence and importance of digital-aided communication in protests that are both contentious and on everyday bases. The former one highlights the sustaining of movement networks that allied citizens from contentious moments to the ever longer period of “movement awaited” – the ebbs and flows of protests. The latter one offers a mapping of how anonymous citizens reacted to governmental decisions on the online platform.

That said, the spectrum ranged from connective action and collective action spans from one end of human-organization based to another anonymity end that is fraught with uncertainties. In  “Cyberactivisim in the Process of Political and Social Change in Arab Countries“, human networks still contribute greatly in terms of protest mobilization and more importantly, bonding the morale when external stimulus demise. “Protesting on Twitter: Citizenship and Empowerment from Public Education” pointed out that, while the online platform is free from a lot of restrictions which hinder people’s participation in previous age, the citizenship, by all means, is actualized through people’s active social conscious and empowerment that is educated and practiced in everyday life in the real world.

New challenges such as human’s substitute AI (artificial intelligent) produce puzzles which are unsolvable at this stage, among which a crucial question goes to whether AI can really think. Perhaps AI can help with household chords while there is still a long way to go before AI can take an active role in the world – the learning, practicing and reflecting what do human mean to the society, and vice versa.

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Transnational family, temporality and media

On September 7-8, I attended a thematic research workshop at the University of Portsmouth (UK). The theme of the workshop, quite vividly corresponding to the urban life in many global cities, especially in Asia, is transnationalism. A seemingly grandiose topic while very much down-to-earth, “transnationalism in the global world – contested state, society, border, people in between” takes place among a large number of families in Asian cities: Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Patterns of transnationalism vary: the bread-winner travels more than stays with the family; housemaids from another country living together with the employer family; family members scatter around the globe and are connected via media tools, and to name a few.

Time, in this setting, is polysemic and multi-layered. While the material bonds of collective life are dispersed, the shared imaginary of belonging to a community/family transcends spatial borders and also encompasses past trajectories and future continuities. In this regard, media tools play an essential role to sustain and realize such trajectories and continuities. The advancement of mass transportation facilitates the border-crossing travel which enables transnational experience in business, academics and a wide range of social life. The invention of optical cable and the internet blurs these borders by bringing in temporal simultaneity as family members could still share the Christmas together via Skype group chatting and collectively make important decisions via instant conversation tools.

However, the advantageous conditions above provided by media tools, to a large extent, benefit more on those enjoying social-economic privileges while unskilled labors (migrant labors) suffer from “time” – the mis-matching of temporalities in their lives. To put it simple, the simultaneous daily life of the transnational housemaids (e.g. Filipinos and Indonesians) is with their employers instead of their own families. The simultaneity of their family members far away in the home countries, in forms such as children’s entering of college, marriage events and even sickness and death, is out of control from the housemaids. A mis-matching of time in their life could hardly be solved by media tools but curbed by the cruel social conditions – the globalization of capital and manpower.

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During this workshop, the critical topic of “transnationalism” could no longer be a simple illusion of optimism in terms of world travel or monetary flow. A bloody reality is at the door step, urging us to re-think and to re-tell of “fairy tale”.

Media education in an era of “post-truth”

A thematic conference The Third International Conference on Popular Culture and Education takes place in the Education University of Hong Kong on July 20th-22nd, 2017. The conference is organized by the Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities and the Literature and Cultural Studies Department.

One of the highlights of the conference is the keynote speech delivered by the prominent scholar of media literacy, Prof. David Buckingham, Emeritus Professor of Media and Communications at Loughborough University. His inspiring speech “Teaching Media in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age: Fake News, Media Bias and the Challenge for Media Literacy Education” not only pinpoints the trends in the contemporary media landscape which is fraught with “fake news”, but also proposes possible solutions in the field of media education.

 

First of all, it is not a strange phenomenon that we are surrounded by “fake news” in everyday life, from political news to entertainment. Fake news is a somewhat inclusive category: hoax messages, spoof stories which people take them as real, and political lies which were extremely excessive during political campaigns (e.g. pro-brexit groups painted an ad on a bus saying: “We spend the EU 350 million pound a week, let’s fund our NHS instead. Vote leave. Let’s take back control.). Tabloids full of fake news”). Sometimes “fake news” is revealed in a form of “disinformation”: telling part of the truth but misleading the message to another direction. Tabloids are full of fake news. And social media and emails is a major platform for “clickbaits”. Moreover, as online video channels such as YouTube is not bounded by the political advertising regulations, political propaganda bombards. What is even more familiar to the mass population is the president of the United States, Donald Trump who is the master of “fake news” on Twitter.

So, what’s the problem? For decades, people used to blaming the media for letting the rampant fake news grow. From a perspective of political sociology, it could generate a threat to democracy, as what the concept “media logic’ has told us that mass media has played the role as the surrogate of public opinion. Instead of going through formal “political logic” (e.g. policy making and deliberation), political figures and entities are inclined to make use of media, both in legacy and digital forms, as the major terrain of democratic practice. As a result, a new term has risen: post-truth – the alternative facts that triumph objective facts and the latter become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.  We have seen a changing media landscape – a few number of major media outlets are given way to popular vernacular voices.

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Admitting the important role of the government to impose more regulations to respond to the changing society, Prof. Buckingham advanced the discussion by proposing media literacy as a more profound solution to address the issue. Instead of sticking to a checklist which is adhere to traditional media education pedagogy: Examine provenance; Assess authority; Check source; Cross check facts; and evaluate design (always capital letters? Flash colours?), Prof. Buckingham affirms that critical thinking is the ultimate goal of media literacy education. Going beyond a static “checklist”, he suggests:

  • Think twice and put fake news in a wider context of news bias and (mis)representation
  • Media bias: defining terms, objectivity, balance, agenda setting
  • Know how to make news.

While media and education scholars are still paying every effort to tackle the issue, a best solution is yet to come. Media literacy education is never an individualistic approach that readers/audiences could sit back and watch online news comfortably after taking a course, but a social responsibility to build a better environment, to bring back the role of mass media as the fourth power, a check-and-balance force against the government.

 

Re-thinking digital competence

In their latest article, Amiama-Espaillat and Mayor-Ruiz demonstrated a comprehensive study on Generation Z in the Dominican Republic. Aiming at assessing their digital reading and reading competence, the researchers conducted survey among adolescents at 10th grade in both public and private schools. Adopting existing reading competence measure scales, the researchers discovered that the reading proficiency literacy vary between students in the two types of schools.

It is concluded that, “a student with prior knowledge and one who lives in a literate culture will more efficiently incorporate what one has read while at the same time enriching one’s reading experience. It is a matter of the ‘rich get richer.'” On the contrary, a student with limited prior knowledge and reading habitus, even if the person reads a lot and uses ICTs, that student will be unable to efficiently incorporate the information.

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Cruel but true, the gaps in whatever terms such as knowledge gap, digital gap and so on, exist and the situation is even getting deteriorated. It has been testified by lots of scholars that, what matters most to people’s digital competence is their knowledge of how to use it and the peer culture that creates a “habitus” of “getting used to using it”, instead of the how the quantity of digital devices available to the people. To put it in an ancient Chinese saying, “it is better teach how to fish than give fish” – an ancient wisdom while still exhibits contemporary universal value. This significant but callous phenomenon has been well proved by the authors.

While the measure tools adopted by Amiama-Espaillat and Mayor-Ruiz so comprehensive that we as readers are able to grasp a general picture of how Dominican teenagers make use of their digital devices in daily life, I am curious if the teens, who show lower points in reading proficiency competence, could be regarded as “low competence”. As the authors of the article well aware of that: “students’ use of Internet, even for academic purposes, seems to be insufficient to develop the necessary reading or digital competence”, the digital competence of people, especially who are termed as the “generation z”, comes little from schooling or academic activities. It is quite true that, from our daily observation and also from the minor findings of this study, multi-channel use of digital devices constitutes the major part of people’s learning experience – learning by doing. There is not significant discrepancy between different generations in terms of learning process.

As pointed by the article authors,  there is a great need to further examine other factors such as teachers’ technological and pedagogic competence. Perhaps, more facets are worthy of further examination: parenting, peer groups, and the process-dimension that shows how teenagers gradually adopt certain digital use habits.

 

Amiama-Espaillat, C. & Mayor-Ruiz, C. (2017). Digital Reading and Reading Competence – The influence in the Z Generation from the Dominican Republic [Lectura digital en la competencia lectora: La influencia en la Generación Z de la República Dominicana]. Comunicar, 52, 105-114. https://doi.org/10.3916/C52-2017-10 

Link to the article: https://www.grupocomunicar.com/indice-en/articulo.php?numero=52-2017-10

 

Early forms of globalization – Hong Kong film

From the very beginning of its development, Hong Kong film industry has been facilitated and furthered to full blossom by forces from different directions. These forces, monetary, manpower, creative power and technologies, accidentally, forcefully or under explicit plans, converged in Hong Kong to make film and cinema a lucrative business. A number of modes of Hong Kong film development have been pointed out: national cinema (as part of Chinese cinema), local cinema, regional cinema (e.g. influence in Southeast Asia) and global cinema (e.g. connections with the western world). It is Hong Kong’s unique geopolitical and economic status that nurture the Hollywood in the East, the dream factory for a phenomenal number of film talents and film merchants throughout the century. A hundred-year’s history of Hong Kong film industry reveals a sub-history of inbound-outbound culture and resource interchange.

As early as 1920s, Shaw brothers originated from Shanghai moved their filming business to Hong Kong and continued to explore potential markets in Southeast Asia. among the four Shaw brothers, Run Run and Runmei were sent to Malaya and Singapore to expand business network. At that time, the major cinema market in Malaya and Singapore was in the hands of migrations from South China, divided into different cultural circles according to their dialects such as Cantonese, Chiu Chow dialect and Hakka dialect. With assistance from some prominent figures who were also Chinese emigrants, in 1927, they settled down in Malaya, renting theaters to exclusively screen Tianyi productions (the film company by Shaw family). In 1940, they opened their first overseas studio in Singapore and started to make Malay-language films starring Malay Cantonese opera superstars[1]. From the mid-1930s and 1940s, the Shaw brothers bought amusement parks from Chinese Malayans. By that time, the Southeast Asian entertainment business founded by Run Run and Runmei was constituted with a sizable theater chain and two amusement parks. Without doubt, they had laid the foundation stone for Tianyi’s further development in overseas market[2]. This network was even extended to Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesian Java with over a hundred theaters and ten amusement parks. As early as the 1930s, the inception of Shaw family’s ambition of territorialization could already be spotted.

After the anti-Japanese war, facing the rise of strong competitors, Run Run Shaw was appointed to move back to Hong Kong from Singapore, to revive the shrinking filming business. When Run Run arrived in Hong Kong in 1957, he purchased a huge land in Clear Water Bay to establish a studio and started to found the Shaw Brothers film company. Different from the traditional practice, Run Run mimicked Hollywood system, focusing on both the quality and efficiency of film production by recruiting versatile talents to look over different functional sectors and introducing a centralized streamline-based production system. By that time, the entertainment network constituted of cinema chains, amusement parks and cabaret had reached to a wide range of territories from Hong Kong to south sea, with a full blossom of film business: cross regional distribution, cross-genre, cross-language (including Hokkien and ChiuChow language), and multiethnic (Chinese, Malay and Indian). Even under the shadow of the cold war, the prosperity of Shaw family’s business had ceaselessly revealed the process of territorialization and even globalization[3].

There is no other place in the world that the film industry of a city is ranked equivalent to a national level. In film history, we have British films, French films and Indian films. Hong Kong films are never equal to Chinese films. Hong Kong film is Hong Kong film per se.

Described by a Filipino young adult, he encountered “Hong Kong” for the first time in his life via “Kung Fu movie”. A mysterious but exciting encounter at a wooden hut which was run by Chinese emigrants bridged this young man with a place he even did not know the exact location. Twenty years later, this young boy pursued his further study in Hong Kong, bringing his childhood memory to reality.

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When I was around 7 years old, my mother would give us 5 pesos to watch kung fu in what was a house where the living room was transformed into a makeshift theater in the  afternoon. This was between the late 80s and early 90s. To me, it was the only incentive for walking to our store and my grandfather’s corn mill from where our house was. It always happened in the afternoon, around the same time we gave our yayas (nannies) a headache for not taking a tap.

Perhaps that was my first encounter with Hong Kong films — although at that time I really did not care where the kung fu movies came from. The swordplay, the flying long hair-men dressed in silk robes, and the fight scenes that almost always started with conversations over bowls of noodles and wine-drinking were simply “Chinese” to me. Everything that sounded Chinese to me as a kid was simply China, never Hong Kong nor Taiwan. In fact, our fascination with Chinese kung fu films went to as far as us mouthing gibberish that at least sounded (but was never at all) Chinese every time we mimicked kung fu fight scenes.” (https://smarkbites.wordpress.com/2017/05/08/kung-fu-in-a-living-room-by-night-movie-house-by-day/)

[1] Yu Mo-wan, 1997, History of Hong Kong Film (Vol 3) – 1940s 香港電影史話 (第三卷) – 四十年代, p.25.

[2] Chung, Po-yin, 2003, “The Industrial Evolution of a Fraternal Enterprise: The Shaw Brothers and the Shaw Organisation 兄弟企業的工業轉變- 邵氏兄弟和邵氏機構”, in Wong, Ain-ling (Ed.). The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study 邵氏電影初探 (pp.1-13). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive; Chung, Po-yin, 2011, “Connect Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore: The story of Shaw Brothers (1920s-1950s) 連接上海、香港和新加坡:邵氏兄弟的故事”. In Yeh, Y. Y. (Ed.). Rethinking Chinese Film Industry: New Methods, New Histories華語電影工業:新歷史與新方法. Beijing: Beijing University Press.

[3] Yung Sai-shing, 2008, “Territorialization and the entertainment industry of the Shaw Brothers in Southeast Asia”, in Fu Poshek (Ed.). China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema (pp.133-153). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

 

 

Multi-temporalities of Protest Songs in Hong Kong (an ongoing project)

Plenty of research has highlighted the significance of music in collective actions for evoking and reifying aspirations and grievances, as well as consolidating solidarity among activists. This paper will contribute to the literature on pop music in protest movements by analyzing the meanings of three Cantopop (Cantonese pop music) songs in the construction of a collective Hong Kong identity during the 2014 Umbrella Movement.

Through the perspective of the historical and cultural studies of music, I start my research project on Hong Kong’s protest music in the recent decades, their spatial, temporal and social implications. Specifically, I fathom how music/songs have projected an imagined Hong Kong among the people in a particular historical timeframe.

To begin with, the Umbrella Movement in 2014 sets milestone: contradictions and connections between the songs <Under the Lion Rock>,  <Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies>, and <Hoist the Umbrella>. Tracing their respective historical contexts and impacts on Hong Kong society, while engaging with theoretical discussions on the function of pop songs in protests, this paper will unpack how the three songs (re)define three spatial registers: the Umbrella Movement, the Hong Kong society and the generational location. The historical epochs giving rise to these songs and the contradictory ethos embodied by them were (re)imagined and (re)articulated in the Umbrella Movement protest.

<Under the Lion Rock> is the theme song of a TV series that originated in the 1970’s. It manifests the so-called “Lion Rock spirit” supposedly shared by all walks of life in Hong Kong. This was an ethos interpellating recent immigrants from mainland China and their children to work hard for the prosperity of the city. <Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies> was composed and sung by the local band Beyond in the 1980’s, the golden age of both Hong Kong’s economic development and its entertainment industry. This song expresses the desire for freedom and the courage to dream. <Hoist the Umbrella> came out of the Umbrella Movement and is sung by a group of pro-movement pop singers.

October 28, 2014 marked the full month since the outpouring of Hong Kong people taking part in the Umbrella Movement after the police’s use of tear gas to disperse the initial protesters. On this date, amid an ocean of mobile phone flashlights and fervent chants of “I want genuine universal suffrage,” the three songs were performed in Hong Kong’s central business district, which had become one of the occupation sites of the Movement. These three songs registered the past, present and future of Hong Kong. Together, they epitomized the trajectory of Hong Kong people’s identity, from refugees to homo economicus to……. us past colonial ideology and the myth of economic evolution and the in-situ re-interpreted and re-defined of the past “memory” in this Umbrella Movement. The de-politicized song <Under the Lion Rocks> which advocated grass-root citizens stop complaining but endeavour head to toe, was endowed with a post-colonial signature and movement-specific interpretation of the keywords “complain”, “on the same boat” and so on. In the same vein, the <Vast Ocean and Sky> was transformed from an autobiographic account of a legendary band to a collective declaration of democratic pursuit. Such re-contextualization of songs was eventually concretised in the <Hoist the Umbrella>.

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