Page 48 - Demo

Chapter 246Comparing the predominance of coloured dots in 2018 and 2019, we observe a decrease in visual usage amongst pro- actors (green dots). The spreading of red dots in 2019 shows opponents using all types of visuals, which can point to their awareness of the impact of visuals on the debate. This increase of opponents visual is more prominent in South Africa and United Kingdom.In 2019 the pro-actors in the United Kingdom again posted a broad variety of types of images. Neutral actors in South Africa started to use more data visualisations. In Mexico, there was a decrease in posting images of people, and an increase in data visualisations about environmental risks. Striking is also a higher number of pro actors’ visuals in Mexican URLs.In general, the little presence of academic or scientific entities’ URL in the digital debate for the three countries must be highlighted. Furthermore, when manually coding the actors per position, we noticed that the political agenda largely dominated the internet’s debate.2.5.3 Grounding resultsSo far, we have explored possible connections between the content and type of posted images on one hand, and positions of online actors in a controversy on the other. We also compared this between three different internet regions and in two different points in time. These analyses indicated that shifting of positions relates to shifts in posting image types and content. In this section, we aim to explore possible explanations of these findings by linking these online debate findings with the events in each country. In digital methods, this is called ‘grounding the debate’ (Rogers, 2013, 2019), which allows a better understanding of the role of online visuals when depicting a local debate.The Mexican data show that the prominent online actors in 2018 were most of all companies and the government that were promoting the shale gas agenda, and some civil organisations arguing against it based on the experiences and data from other countries. Images of people and groups – mostly governmental officials – were, then more prominent amongst proponents. In 2019, after a change of president and political party, and with a more technical and internationalised debate, Mexican pro-actors decreased (mostly companies), and some actors made a shift from proponent to neutral and from neutral to opponent. In 2019, Efrat.indd 46 19-09-2023 09:47