ABSTRACT
This chapter explores visual citizenship through the textual and visual analysis of Brexit-related Flickr and Twitter posts published in the month that followed the momentous vote. It does so by focusing on the posts of ordinary citizens and by quantitatively examining how topics, visual genres, social relations and stances are incorporated in these posts. However, even when Brexit (hash)tags were included in these posts, this did not automatically guarantee a direct discernible link to the referendum. As Flickr in particular allows for a high number of tags per post, and users additionally use hashtags very broadly, only three out of four posts in the Flickr corpus were directly Brexit-related. Largely the same topics were discussed on Twitter and Flickr, although compared to findings from other research, immigration, sovereignty and the NHS only play a minor role in the corpus. Brexit itself is more prominent, as a high number of posts tend to share general attitudes without addressing more specific topics. While both Twitter and Flickr posts mostly perform an additional function of self-expression, Twitter posts with only one social function are predominantly used for information sharing, while single-function Flickr posts more often contain a form of eye-witnessing. Lastly, the posts that articulated a stance mostly came out against Brexit. However, a remarkably large proportion of posts did not take a stance either xxivway, as the information-sharing on Twitter and the eye-witnessing on Flickr often occurred without it.
