Enacting cross-platform (buy/boy)cotts: Yellow Economic Circle and the new citizen-consumer politics in Hong Kong

Abstract

While existing studies assert that citizens actively use digital media to exert their political agency, the various roles and impacts of digital media should be further unpacked. Building on the notions of ‘digital democratic affordance’ and ‘cross-platform play’, this article uniquely theorises political consumerism as a multi-scalar mode of human–non-human interactions. The concept of multi-scalar cross-platform affordances is formulated to demonstrate how different digital platforms – large or small, corporate or amateur, global or local – co-constitute an environment in which citizens are progressively channelled to engage in multiple platforms, reinvent them in concert with one another and participate in political consumption across time and space. In the case of the Yellow Economic Circle, against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement, we examine such cross-platform dynamics and their multi-scalar enactment of everyday political consumption practices across four stages: deliberation, crowdsourcing, materialisation and habituation.