Online radio listening as ‘affective publics’? (Closeted) participation in the post-Umbrella Movement everyday

The porosity of the online media space blurs the boundary between the political, the popular and the social. While most media scholarship concentrates on the ‘DIY participation’ that the internet enables, it overlooks the fact that most of the users are just consumers of the array of political platforms. Employing Ranciere’s notion of the aesthetics of the everyday and using the case of online radio listening, the paper re-examines the politics of participatory practices in the politicized everyday, as the audience traverses fan practices and quotidian virtual activism. This paper focuses on elderly and female listener communities, to discuss how the porous social mediascape may foster a ‘participation of the sensible’, where ‘the ordinary’ engages in online radio listening as subversive act against the government, but also calculated political AND social strategy against the harshening political reality and social division. The case of Hong Kong would also hope to articulate the nuanced interplay between media participation and the politically divided juncture.