How do ‘the people’ visually represent themselves under populism? And how have visual technologies enabled and changed how they do this in the contemporary political landscape? Despite a burgeoning literature on ‘the visual politics of populism’Footnote 1 developing in recent years, these questions remain unanswered, with most focus being paid to the ways populist leaders and parties use visuals in a ‘top-down’ manner.Footnote 2 Yet populist publics also use visuals – from a more ‘bottom-up’ direction – and often do so in order to depict themselves as ‘the people’. In this article, I explore this process, which I refer to as the visual self-mediation of ‘the people’ in contemporary populist politics. I consider how this process operates; the technological shifts that have enabled this visual self-mediation of ‘the people’; the potential audiences for such visual representations; and why it matters for understanding populism today across the globe.
To ground this argument, I adopt a diachronic, structured comparisonFootnote 3 of two emblematic episodes in which contestations over state legitimacy were performed through visual claims to represent ‘the people’: the short-lived coup d’état against Hugo Chávez that briefly ousted him as president in Caracas, Venezuela, in April 2002; and the US Capitol riots that took place in Washington, DC, in the United States, on 6 January 2021. These events, both popularly understood as ‘media events’ or ‘media coups’,Footnote 4 involved populist publics entering symbolically loaded seats of political power while seeking to assert popular sovereignty in visually performative ways. In the US case, the populist public initiated the storming of state institutions; in Venezuela, by contrast, the populist public mobilised in opposition to a coup and in defence of the incumbent. Despite these and other differences across region, ideology, and political context, the cases offer a productive contrast for understanding how the mediated constitution of ‘the people’ has evolved over time. Crucially, they allow us to trace a historical shift from televisual mediation, dependent on traditional media gatekeepers, to digitally enabled self-mediation in the smartphone era. Rather than pursuing a variable-controlled design, I follow the logic of structured historical comparison,Footnote 5 using the Venezuelan case as not a symmetrical counterpart but rather a historical counterpoint – a baseline from which to trace broader transformations in the technological and aesthetic conditions that shape how publics claim populist legitimacy. As such, these are not ‘representative’ cases per se, but rather cases selected for their heuristic and contrastive value:Footnote 6 they are emblematic moments that help illuminate how shifts in media regimes shape the visual performance of ‘the people’. As later sections show, these media conditions not only shaped how publics became visible but also structured which identities – racial, national, or cultural – were rendered legitimate as ‘the people’.
Both events also became iconic visual flashpoints whose mediated imagery continues to shape their political afterlives. In Venezuela, the meaning of the media footage of the coup remains contested decades later, with scholars and filmmakers revisiting how the events were framed, represented, and resisted.Footnote 7 In the Capitol riots, imagery from the horned ‘QAnon Shaman’ to livestreams from the Senate floor quickly crystallised into global visual tropes.Footnote 8 Analytically, the contrast between the two cases illustrates how shifts in media infrastructure – from television controlled by hostile elites to networked digital self-documentation – reshape the capacity of populist publics to constitute themselves as ‘the people’. Following the principles of concept-led case analysis,Footnote 9 the theoretical argument is developed in tandem with the empirical discussion rather than treated separately.Footnote 10 I rely primarily on the extant academic literature on the events to construct my understanding of the cases, particularly from the fields of political communications and cultural studies, but supplement this with journalistic material where necessary. In doing so, the article contributes to a growing recognition that the visual politics of populism cannot be understood apart from the technological infrastructures that mediate political subjecthood. It asks how the rise of smartphones, livestreaming, and social platforms has reshaped not only the circulation of images but also the conditions of visibility and the aesthetics of legitimacy itself.
The article proceeds as follows. First, I explain what I mean by populism, setting out a discursive-performative approach to the phenomenon. I also outline the primarily ‘top-down’ approach of the extant literature on the visual politics of populism, and explain why we need to pay attention to the ‘bottom up’ as well – that is, visuals from the so-called ‘people’. Second, I introduce the 2002 Venezuelan case to demonstrate the limited capacity of populist publics to use technology to visually self-mediate at the turn of the century, and highlight the role of televisual mediation of ‘the people’. Third, I turn to the case of the 2021 US Capitol riots, honing in on the technological affordances provided to populist publics by the shift to digital mobile visual technologies, and how this allowed them to self-mediate as a ‘people’. Fourth, I consider the question of who visuals across these cases were directed towards – namely asking who the intended and unintended audiences for these mediated depictions of ‘the people’ are, and considering the limits of populist publics’ self-mediation in a ‘hybrid media system’Footnote 11 where traditional media still has a monopoly on the production and distribution of iconic images – even if ‘self-mediation’ is rampant and easily broadcast. Finally, I conclude the article by summarising my key arguments and their implications, considering their applicability to non-populist politics, and outlining future directions for research.
Populism, visual politics, and ‘the people’
Before we get to the question of how ‘the people’ under populism represent themselves visually, a more fundamental question: what is populism? While there are numerous conceptual approaches to the phenomenon, the popular idea that there is ‘no agreement about what populism is’Footnote 12 is inaccurate. Indeed, the three central approaches to the topic in the contemporary academic literature identified by MoffittFootnote 13 – the ideational approach, which considers populism a type of ideology or worldview;Footnote 14 the strategic approach, which argues that populism is an electoral strategy or mode of political organisation;Footnote 15 and the discursive-performative approach, which sees populism as a type of discourse, performance, mode of communication, or political styleFootnote 16 – all broadly acknowledge that populism is a phenomenon that revolves around a binary opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. While each approach has its strengths, I utilise the discursive-performative approach to populism in this article for several reasons.
First, the discursive-performative approach not only acknowledges the existence of the people/elite binary at the heart of populism – it also recognises that the construction of ‘the people’ is constitutive to populism more broadly.Footnote 17 In this sense, it sees populism as something that is done – a practice, rather than simply an attribute of political actors.Footnote 18 The discursive-performative approach is thus useful for comparative analysis of the type undertaken in this article, as it acknowledges that these constructions of ‘the people’ can take place across the political spectrum; that they are not by default anti-democratic; and moreover, that the category of ‘the people’ is never truly ‘empty’ in practice, but shaped by other intersecting discourses and logics (such as race, nativism, class, and gender) that characterise who is seen as legitimately belonging in a democracy – and importantly, who is excluded.Footnote 19 As I show later in this article, these dynamics are crucial to understanding the visual construction of ‘the people’ in both cases, though they manifest in very different ways.
Second, and in line with this, this approach stresses that populism is not just about what is said or written, but also more broadly what is enacted, performed, and presentedFootnote 20 – something that is valuable when we are interested in thinking about the role of visual media in populism. Third and relatedly, this approach has arguably been the most forward-thinking in considering how we methodologically approach populism in non-logocentric ways: beyond looking at speeches, party manifestoes and the like, it has considered the role of bodily performance,Footnote 21 fashion,Footnote 22 and Instagram postsFootnote 23 amongst other visual media in considering how populism functions, appeals, and operates.
Indeed, work in this tradition has been at the forefront on the burgeoning literature on what has been called ‘the visual politics of populism’.Footnote 24 Taking theoretical and methodological inspiration from the broader literature on ‘visual politics’, most developed in critical international relationsFootnote 25 and political communications,Footnote 26 this literature has argued that ‘there is a clear (even if not explicitly noted) sense that the visual plays a very important role in populism’Footnote 27 and explored this in various ways. This has involved examining how different populist parties and leaders across the globe represent ‘the people’ in their visual communication;Footnote 28 how populist leaders visually represent themselves on social media;Footnote 29 how populists depict their enemies;Footnote 30 how the media depict populists;Footnote 31 and even the kinds of colours and aesthetics favoured by populists.Footnote 32
While this literature is innovative, creative, and thoughtful, and has done much in a short time to develop our understanding of a previously underexamined aspect of populism, one key limitation of it thus far is its heavy focus on the ‘supply-side’ of populism.Footnote 33 In other words, it has focused on the visual communication coming ‘top down’ from populist leaders and parties, and less so on the visual communication coming ‘bottom up’ from the purported ‘people’ of populism. While this is understandable – it is arguably much easier to access and gather visual material from ‘top-down’ sources like party websites, official social network accounts, and campaign material like posters, advertisements, and logos than the more diffuse and less ‘official’ materials from ‘bottom up’Footnote 34 – it still leaves a large gap in terms of our knowledge about the visual dimensions of populism. Moreover, this gap is an important one. We know, from the visual politics literature on non-populist social movements (such as the Gezi Park protests in Türkiye or the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States), that visuals play an important role in identity formation and expression: they are used from ‘below’ to help protestors ‘become visible’,Footnote 35 to make their demands clear, and to support their coherence as collective identities.Footnote 36 So how might this work under populism?
It is crucial at this point to acknowledge that the binary between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ political communication and mobilisation is a crude one – and in an age of ‘astroturf’ campaigns,Footnote 37 which purport to be grassroots but are often funded by elite lobby groups, the border between the two has become blurrier (the same might be said of the supply versus demand binary when speaking about political actors – supply clearly helps constitute demand, and demand drives supply in terms of co-constituting political identities and interests, and it can be hard to discern where one ends and the other begins). Despite these drawbacks, however, the top-down/bottom-up divide remains a useful heuristic for thinking through the process of the visual self-mediation of ‘the people’: it is about members of populist publics visually depicting themselves as ‘the people’, rather than a populist leader, party, or representative depicting the same group. In short, the visual self-mediation relies on the actor doing the mediating, and their (internal) position vis-à-vis ‘the people’ they are depicting.
Before explaining how this works, it is worth drawing some terminological boundaries around the question of ‘the people’. As LaclauFootnote 38 has argued, ‘the people’ under populism functions as something of an ‘empty signifier’, in that it is a term that has no ‘automatic’ or inevitable corresponding content: instead, its ‘emptiness’ indicates that it can be filled with numerous different characterisations. This is something that Moffitt has argued can be done with not only words but also images, given that images communicate ‘a certain sense of “concreteness”, strongly implying presence and corporeality – and thus existence – of “the people”’.Footnote 39 It is understood in the discursive-performative literature on populism that leaders often do that ‘filling’ of the empty signifier of ‘the people’ by offering characterisations of ‘the people’ to audiences who relate to and identify with such characterisations.Footnote 40 However, there is a growing understanding that the signifier ‘the people’ can also be filled ‘from below’.Footnote 41 The issue is that the terminology becomes confusing and stuck in something of a recursive loop when we think about this process: how can ‘the people’ fill ‘the people’, so to speak?
To avoid this tautological language, I want to introduce Curato’sFootnote 42 concept of ‘populist publics’, a term she developed to emphasise the agency of those who follow populist leaders. Curato’s definition of populist publics is quite simple: ‘a broad category of citizens who express support for a populist leader’.Footnote 43 However, her specific word choice of ‘publics’ is important for two reasons. First, as she argues, terms often assigned to those who identify with populist leaders – such as ‘audience’ or ‘followers’ – imply passivity or spectatorship, whereas ‘the concept of publics underscores an active construction of shared sociability and political reason’,Footnote 44 highlighting their agency.Footnote 45 Second, the plural form ‘publics’ conveys the ‘multi-layered, negotiated, and fleeting character’Footnote 46 of populist support; it comes from multiple identities and groups, who are publics ‘by virtue of connectivity in discourse, rather than a cohesive monolithic set of beliefs that underpin their support for a populist leader’.Footnote 47 Drawing these together, we can thus say that a) populist publics have agency in terms of co-constructing ‘the people’ with (or even without) the populist leader and b) there are multiple populist publics involved in this process, who may offer differing characterisations of ‘the people’. Moreover, we now have the terms to avoid the unhelpful loop of talking about ‘the people’ filling ‘the people’: instead, we can talk of populist publics seeking to construct ‘the people’ – in our case, using visual technologies, which together we can refer to as the visual ‘self-mediation of the people’ under populism.Footnote 48 It is to this process that I now want to turn to in the context of two very different cases of populist ‘media coups’ involving the capture of presidential compounds by populist publics – one in Caracas in 2002 and one in Washington in 2021 – and to track how digital visual technologies have changed how this process operates.
The televisual mediation of ‘the people’ in the Venezuelan coup of 2002
Why bring these two events into comparative dialogue – on the one hand, the failed Venezuelan coup d’état of 2002, which briefly deposed President Hugo Chávez, and on the other, the 2021 US Capitol riots carried out by supporters of Donald Trump? Although these cases differ in ideological orientation, geopolitical context, and the position of the populist public in relation to institutional power, they also share key features that make them analytically comparable. Both involve mass mobilisations centred on polarising populist leaders; both took place in and around highly symbolic state spaces; and both function as media-saturated moments in which populist publics sought to assert themselves as ‘the people’ through visual performance. As mentioned earlier, methodologically, the article follows the logic of structured, focused comparison,Footnote 49 applied diachronically to trace how transformations in media infrastructure shape the conditions under which populist publics claim visibility and legitimacy. The Venezuelan case provides a historical and technological counterpoint that foregrounds the distinct affordances of digital self-mediation visible in the Capitol riots. In Venezuela, a left-wing populist public mobilised in defence of an incumbent president and struggled to access televisual representation through hostile media institutions. In the United States, a right-wing populist public enacted a disruptive incursion into state power while livestreaming its actions through personal devices. Read together, the cases illustrate how the performative construction of ‘the people’ is mediated differently across time, technology, and regime type.
Some context for readers who might not be as familiar with the Venezuelan case as that of the Capitol riots.Footnote 50 Throughout early 2002, there was widespread dissatisfaction with Hugo Chávez’s leadership, related primarily to growing concerns about corruption, his use of emergency powers, and perceptions that his mode of governing had taken an authoritarian turn. In response to this, opposition leaders and affiliated trade unions organised a general strike in early April, as well as protest marches in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, on 11 April. Approximately one million people participated in these marches, and while initially peaceful, this changed once opposition leaders directed the protests towards Miraflores Palace (the presidential palace), where supporters of Chávez had assembled. Violence and confusion ensued, with 19 people dying in a shootout between police and protestors. Chávez directed the Venezuelan military to restore public order, but they rejected his command and demanded his resignation. When Chávez refused to step down, the military entered Miraflores Palace and arrested him. The head of Venezuela’s main business federation, Pedro Carmona, was named interim president, the Constitution declared void, and the National Assembly and Supreme Court dissolved. Meanwhile, as news spread that Chávez had been arrested, his Chávista populist publics took to the streets in protest. Military officers who remained loyal to Chávez also made their voices heard, with the Presidential Guard storming and retaking the Miraflores Palace from Carmona. Carmona, sensing that the coup had failed, resigned from his interim position and Chávez was restored to power, returning to the palace in a helicopter to adoring crowds. It was all over in less than two days. This distinguishes the Venezuelan case from the US Capitol riots: here, the populist public did not storm state institutions to challenge electoral outcomes, but mobilised against an elite-led coup in defence of a populist incumbent. Their mobilisation was reactive and restorative, rather than insurgent or anti-democratic.
For our purposes, the most pertinent detail in these events was the role of visual media, and how it was used by populist publics in the coup to mediate their ‘peoplehood’. Beasley-Murray notes that the coup ‘took place in the media, fomented by the media, and with the media themselves the apparent object of both sides’ contention’.Footnote 51 Terms such as ‘“media war”, “virtual coup” [and] “media terrorism”’Footnote 52 were used as key descriptors for the events. Television was crucial here: Chávez, in the hours preceding his deposal, ‘tried to take over the television networks, literally as well as symbolically’Footnote 53 by broadcasting on all local stations from his office in the presidential palace and calling for calm. The opposition also knew the importance of the televisual, with politicians from their side turning up to television station studios to be interviewed, showing their wounds on the airwaves, and making themselves visually prominent for the soon-to-be-toppled reorder of government in Venezuela.
But the most compelling use of televisual media was that of populist publics sympathetic to Chávez. As large counterdemonstrations against the coup attempt spilled across Caracas, it seemed that Chávez’s populist publics knew that their message would only gain its most powerful expression if it was televisually mediated. With the public broadcaster off the air since the coup, and commercial stations showing their usual fare of light entertainment, populist publics directed their anger and frustration towards the television channels themselves. Crowds showed up outside several television studios, throwing rocks, breaking windows, spraying graffiti, and demanding that their message be broadcast. Realising that they needed to at least be seen to quell the populist publics’ anger, the commercial stations agreed to air their communiques, but then meddled in their transmission, either broadcasting without sound, or showing the images with a textual overlay noting that they were only doing so under duress.Footnote 54 Meanwhile, others managed to take over the public broadcaster and get it back on air. Beasley-MurrayFootnote 55 describes watching this unfold on television in disbelief and recalls the poor aesthetic and sound quality of the broadcast: he describes shaky camera action, out-of-balance colour and contrast, glitchy audio, and how the people appearing on the broadcast were clearly nervous, their hands shaking as they gripped the microphone and pleaded for other stations to show what was really going on outside. The broadcast dropped out numerous times, only to return, and ‘each time the immediate fear was that it had been closed down; each time, it turned out that technical problems were to blame as the channel was making do with a team unaccustomed to the equipment’.Footnote 56
I read these populist publics’ attempts to gain visual coverage as ‘the people’ as an early attempt at visual self-mediation, albeit constrained by the technological limitations of the time. Duno Gottberg notes that ‘the people who raced out into the streets had no existence in the Venezuelan press or on Venezuelan TV’, but that their demand to be represented on television ‘reveals the consciousness of these social groups of the importance of what Bourdieu has called “media arbitration” […] It would appear that in this instance “the mob” knew that mediation through television guaranteed social and political existence’. He quotes one of the crowd whose plea was broadcast by one of the commercial channels:
We want you to listen to us […] we are a huge section of the people, the popular sectors, who don’t have the money that the powerful do, who you allow to transmit what they want every day […] But the people expressed themselves through the vote […] we are Venezuelans too. And we also want to be listened to, and that [our voices] be transmitted via TV.Footnote 57
In short, in 2002 when populist publics sought visual self-mediation as ‘the people’, the technologies open to them to achieve such visibility were out of their hands. They had to beg or take over television stations to broadcast their ‘peoplehood’, and this desperation to be visually represented was an acknowledgement that television was the core medium by which reality was being constructed and mediated in real time. This moment, then, offers a vivid example of a pre-digital media regime in which visibility was contingent on access to elite-controlled infrastructure – a dynamic that throws into sharp relief the very different visual politics of the Capitol riots. So what happens when populist publics have all the tools they need to broadcast their visual mediation as ‘the people’ in their pockets? That is, what does it mean to visually self-mediate, and bypass traditional channels of mediation? It is to this question we now turn to, almost two decades later, in the context of the January 6 Capitol riots.
The digital self-mediation of ‘the people’ in the January 6 Capitol riots
The Capitol riots need little introduction – not only have they been interpreted as one of the key ‘populist events’ of the twenty-first century,Footnote 58 they are also arguably one of the defining political events of the period more broadly. On 6 January 2021, following Donald Trump’s ‘Save America’ rally at the Ellipse, thousands of pro-Trump supporters violently stormed the US Capitol Building in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election result, which saw Trump defeated by Joe Biden. Several people died in or as a result of the events, hundreds were injured,Footnote 59 and the events represented one of the darkest days for contemporary American democracy. Although the case of the 2021 Capitol riots is obviously of intrinsic importance in this regard, here I employ it as an emblematic and instrumental case studyFootnote 60 to think through how populist publics seek to self-mediate as ‘the people’ by using digital visual technologies.
Indeed, digital visual technologies were key to the events and, moreover, central to the way that populist publics in the riots sought to become visible as ‘the people’ through their own self-documentation. This was evident across the broad corpus of visual material that emerged from the events: not only the now-familiar images reported in the traditional media of the likes of the ‘QAnon Shaman’ or of rioters storming through the Capitol’s doors, but of the barrage of images and footage that came from the rioters themselves. This included selfies, livestreams, rioters acting as ‘citizen journalists’, participants performing for the cameras with outlandish costumes and performances, and more. The decision to storm the Capitol, as well as visually document their activities using digital visual technologies, was not spur of the moment: there is clear evidence that some rioters had already planned their breach of the Capitol prior to the eventFootnote 61 and, moreover, to broadcast their activities in the process.Footnote 62
This is what McKeeFootnote 63 has spoken of as the ‘digital self-mediation’ of the rioters: their use of digital visual technologies to photograph, broadcast, and livestream themselves throughout their invasion of the Capitol. What is of interest here to us in the frame of populism is the collective nature of this self-mediation: while the term ‘self-mediation’ is often used in the (political) communications and social media literature in the context of digital media, it tends to be used to refer to the role of the individual (as blogger, vlogger, YouTuber, or social media user) and the way that one builds, experiences, communicates, understands, or expresses the ‘subjective’ individual self through the mediation afforded via public communication technologies.Footnote 64 Yet self-mediation can be used by groups to build, experience, communicate, understand, or express their collective identity as well. As Cammaerts writes with regard to social movements:
self-mediation practices are constitutive of the construction of collective identities, and have become highly relevant in view of disseminating, communicating, recording, and archiving a variety of movement discourses and deeds. Technologies of self-mediation, and their associated self-mediation practices, should thus be seen as the tools through which a social movement becomes self-conscious as a movement.Footnote 65
I argue that this dynamic was at work in the Capitol riots, where populist publics used digital visual technologies to collectively perform and recognise themselves as ‘the people’ – both expressing and constituting a shared political identity through visual self-mediation.
Indeed, the major explanation we should focus on here in terms of understanding the rioters’ ability to self-mediate as ‘the people’ using visuals is technological: namely, the dramatic transformation from visual broadcasting technologies being controlled and monopolised by an elite group (television stations, media companies, and so on as in the Venezuelan case) to a scenario where nearly everyone has a video camera and live-broadcasting suite in the form of a smartphone. Whereas populist publics’ visual claims on behalf of ‘the people’ previously had to be mediated through a series of relatively slow, complex, and costly channels controlled by others, with temporal delays and financial and power-related barriers involved, this can now happen almost instantaneously, and from and to anywhere with cellular data coverage – and you can do it yourself. This, whether we like it or not, is a clear outcome of the ‘democratisation of visual politics’Footnote 66 in which images can be broadcast and circulated at near-instantaneous speed.
The smartphone is key to understanding what unfolded in the Capitol riots in this regard. Gunn,Footnote 67 in her analysis of the events, goes so far to call the riots as ‘one of the most thorough documents of the usage of the smartphone as a filmic apparatus’, and particularly notes the importance of smartphones’ forward-facing camera in rioters’ self-mediation. This goes beyond mere ‘selfies’: instead, the smartphone’s forward-facing camera enabled rioters to stream themselves live, with rioters simultaneously acting as broadcast subject and broadcast recorder and setting up a ‘mode of mediation [that] crosses fluidly between objective and subjective modes, where the capture of reality in front of the lens is subject to interruption and put into a near constant dialectical relationship with the self’.Footnote 68 As she notes, ‘participation in the storming of the Capitol [w]as a simultaneously lived and mediated experience’.Footnote 69 In this sense, it facilitated a collapse between journalist and subject, performer and director, performance and broadcast, imminent experience and its capture, reality and mediation – and between the individual and ‘the people’. This is very much in line with a broader literature that argues that the smartphone is key to understanding political conflict and violence today. Ford, for example, has convincingly argued that ‘the smartphone has become the central device for shaping how war is known, represented and conducted’Footnote 70 in the current age, and there is no reason to think that this does not apply more broadly to a range of dangerous and disruptive political practices.
I am not the only one to suggest that the riots had an identity-building element to them, nor that visual technologies played a key role in this identity-building: McKee interprets rioters’ use of these technologies as ‘a performance of the self-under-construction’Footnote 71 and argues that the ‘self-generated imagery from the rioters points to a desperate need to be seen, to proclaim one’s identity – at times violently – and to document and disseminate this imagery as part of a performance of self to an expected online audience’.Footnote 72 She even goes so far to argue that this visual performance itself was the central goal of the Capitol riots and that the events were less an actual coup attempt and more an exercise in building and expressing a collective identity as the supposedly rightful ‘people’. A similar point, albeit from a more derisive position, is made by Gordon, who suggests that participants ‘appeared keener on devising a series of photo opportunities’ rather than ‘genuinely instigating revolution’Footnote 73 once inside the Capitol – yet those ‘photo opportunities’, I suggest, should not be underestimated given their interpellative value in terms of expressing and building the identity of ‘the people’.
The role of visual self-mediation as ‘the people’ is evident through several stylistic aspects of the images and footage that came out of the Capitol riots. For example, in their analysis of livestream footage from the events, Gilmore et al. found remarkably similar aesthetic tropes and visual language across seven different social media and livestreaming platforms that suggest attempts at self-mediation as a collective identity. These included filming the self in order ‘to place the videographer in the frame and position their body as important to the documentation’;Footnote 74 using tracking ‘to mimic the style of embedded journalists’,Footnote 75 thus giving a sense of ‘credibility’ to the footage; and the use of camera pans in order to portray the size of the crowd at the Capitol, thus contextualising rioters’ self-mediation and capturing the size of ‘the people’ that they were part of to ‘prove’ their democratic legitimacy. This is very much in line with Trump’s recurring obsession with visual depictions of crowd sizes: he has repeatedly and baselessly criticised the media for allegedly doctoring images to minimise the apparent size of his public support, for example at his inauguration.Footnote 76 He also (again, baselessly) claimed that his opponent in the 2024 presidential elections, Kamala Harris, used artificial intelligence to fake crowd images at her campaign events.Footnote 77 As a result, it is no surprise his populist publics sought to demonstrate the size of ‘the people’ that they were part of.
As Gilmore et al. convincingly argue, this shared sense of visual literacy and use of similar aesthetic conventions across rioters’ livestreams suggests that capital-p political outcomes were not the sole interest of rioters on January 6th. Instead, ‘they were also interested in mediated outcomes that were consciously drawing from the structured affordances of their smartphones and their online networks to create many different media spectacles that were distributed across an ecology of platforms’.Footnote 78 Compare this to the shaky, nervous footage of the Chávista populist public of two decades earlier: then, there was little sense of visual literacy, nor forethought about the aesthetic spectacle that was being created. This is entirely due to the fact that the technologies available to the groups were different: one was using expensive and complex visual technology they were unfamiliar with; the other had an everyday cultural fluency and understanding of the digital mobile devices they were using to project themselves visually. The earlier groups’ efforts were almost entirely focused on the demand to be ‘seen’: the latter did not even have to ask that question and, as a result, had far more control over how they were seen.
The content of the footage from the Capitol riots suggests this self-mediation as the specifically populist ‘people’ as well, with a focus on visually proving the populist publics’ ‘ordinary’ bona-fides. While some of the more iconic images that emerged from the Capitol riots were of those in outrageous costumes, other images were striking for their ‘regular’ nature, such as the widely circulated image of the ‘podium guy’ – Adam Johnson, a long-haired, beanie-wearing man casually waving and grinning widely for the camera while attempting to steal Nancy Pelosi’s lectern from the Capitol.Footnote 79 Similar examples abound, with MacGillis noting in his analysis of over 500 livestreams from Parler how much the rioters reminded him of the same people he had seen and been speaking to at Republican campaign rallies and events since the rise of the Tea Party in the late 2000s: ‘a hodgepodge, a cross section of America that includes hardcore white supremacists and people you might run into at a mall or a country club’.Footnote 80 Indeed, this was not a riot where the rioters wanted to hide their identities à la the ‘Black Bloc’, who cover their faces to ensure anonymity when protesting, fighting police, or destroying property;Footnote 81 instead, many Capitol rioters were seemingly happy to display their faces and identities, even posting on social media or posing for photos with their thumbs up.Footnote 82 In other words, the rioters were seeking to be visually identified not as an abstract symbol, but as a people in a populist sense. Indeed, this links both populist publics under examination in this article: although the visual ‘content’ of ‘the people’ is clearly different visually due to the different ideological variants of populism they represent, as well as their very different cultural contexts, the effort to present ‘ordinariness’ or the ‘regular’ nature of ‘the people’ across both cases is striking.
Yet this was not a neutral claim. The populist public that stormed the Capitol was overwhelmingly white and male, and its self-staging invoked nativist tropes of ‘real’ American identity – implicitly excluding non-white, immigrant, and Indigenous others. Whiteness here functioned not only demographically but aesthetically, forming part of the visual grammar of legitimacy that framed these rioters as representative of ‘the people’.Footnote 83 Nativism, too, was embedded in the performance: the presence of flags, slogans, and symbols foregrounded settler-nationalist narratives of rightful ownership of the nation, further narrowing the imagined public that was being self-mediated visually.Footnote 84
In contrast, in the Venezuelan case, the identity of ‘the people’ was shaped less by nativist or racialised tropes than by class and historical exclusion. Chávez’s populist project explicitly sought to incorporate poor, Afro-Venezuelan, Indigenous, and mixed-race communities into the national political imaginary – groups historically marginalised in both elite discourse and mainstream media.Footnote 85 The Chávista public that mobilised in defence of the president in 2002 was notably heterogeneous, with its claim to legitimacy grounded not in ethnic or national purity but in popular sovereignty and social justice. While race and ethnicity were not the overt focus of this mobilisation, the struggle over visibility was implicitly racialised to the extent that it challenged an entrenched media sphere dominated by lighter-skinned, urban elites.Footnote 86 The populist performance here thus centred less on exclusion than on inclusion – on making visible a plural, subaltern populist public long denied representation in national narratives.Footnote 87
Intended and unintended audiences for visual self-mediations of ‘the people’
A fair question to ask at this point is: who are these attempts at visual self-mediation as ‘the people’ actually for? That is: who is the audience for all of this? Keeping in mind Curato’s argument that ‘the populist challenge lies […] in finding spaces for populist publics’ views to secure an audience in the public sphere’,Footnote 88 in this section, I want to consider who the potential various audiences of populist publics’ self-mediation as ‘the people’ might be, as well as the ramifications of having these different audiences. Distinguishing between intended and unintended audiences is useful for thinking through these questions, as is comparing how these audiences differ across the Venezuelan and American cases.
First, we can think of the intended audiences for populist publics’ self-mediation as ‘the people’ via visual technologies. The first intended audience, as is already inscribed in the concept of self-mediation, is populist publics themselves: that is, those who claim to be ‘the people’ and who are, in making that claim, also seeking to convince themselves that they are ‘the people’. This is not to say that they do not truly believe their ‘peoplehood’; rather, it is merely to acknowledge that performing and embodying a role or identity is a key part of identity-formation in the first place.Footnote 89 While we might say broadly that the Chávista ‘populist public’ sought to do this in a general sense through demanding televisual representation, the shift to digital visual media – particularly smartphones with their forward-facing cameras – has made this process more explicit. The aforementioned suggestion that the rioters’ visual self-documentation was clearly an ‘identity-building exercise’Footnote 90 that helped rioters prove to themselves and to each other that they were ‘the people’ speaks very much to this, as do the numerous ‘selfies’ that were taken during the events: these were captured for private use, to mark and remember one’s attendance as part of ‘the people’ at this moment in history.
The second potential audience for the self-mediation of ‘the people’ is the populist leader, to whom populist publics might seek to demonstrate their loyalty and devotion. Here, populist publics’ self-mediation can be read as a response to the leader’s claim to speak for ‘the people’, given that they are seeking to put forward a clear (literal) picture of this ‘people’ through images and footage. In the Capitol riots, the rioters’ visual performances can thus be seen as an expression of their identification with and support for Donald Trump’s claims on behalf of ‘the people’ – and it is clear that Trump indeed was part of the audience here, as reports have confirmed that Trump literally watched the riots take place on television.Footnote 91 The same can be said of the Venezuelan case – the populist public here was very clearly demonstrating their support of Chávez via visual media, but the difference here is that the televisual was the only medium available to do so: the riots however, saw a meeting of the televisual and the digital, with some rioters’ footage being broadcast via more traditional media channels.
The third potential audience for populist publics’ self-mediation is sympathetic audiences who might not already associate themselves with that populist public, but by witnessing and responding positively to the group’s self-depictions, might begin identifying with their claim to be ‘the people’. This might thus work to recruit potential sympathisers and interpellate them into the populist publics’ characterisation of ‘the people’. In the Venezuelan case, this was clearly the goal: to reach out to other supporters and use their visual representative claim to mobilise support using televisual media and encourage them to take to the streets. The dynamic in the Capitol riots in this regard, however, was far more fluid, as evident in rioters’ disturbing interactions with their livestreams’ viewers: while committing crimes, several influential far right livestreamers interacted with their audiences through responding to their comments in real time, receiving ‘affective’ feedback (in the form of emojis and likes), and even financial support as they committed said crimes in the form of monetary payments of ‘tips’ or micropayments.Footnote 92 The sympathetic audiences were thus virtually ‘there’ with them in a sense – something that was impossible in the Venezuelan case. This is in line with patterns noted in the now-sizeable literature on the livestreaming of crime,Footnote 93 antisocial behaviour,Footnote 94 and mass shootings,Footnote 95 which show how digital spectatorship under livestreaming can both enable and escalate violent acts. These studies highlight how real-time affective responses such as comments, emojis, and donations can incentivise perpetrators, co-produce meaning in the moment of violence, and blur the line between audience and participant. In such contexts, violence becomes not only a communicative act but an interactive performance, shaped by algorithmic visibility and digital applause.
Finally, a fourth intended audience might be opponents and other unsympathetic viewers. Here, a populist publics’ self-mediation in the name of ‘the people’ might be seen in the context of the phenomenon of affective polarisation,Footnote 96 with their vision of ‘the people’ being put forward in order to block, contest, or frustrate other groups’ claims to democratic legitimacy – or more simply to intimidate their political opponents. This was certainly the case in both the Venezuelan example and the Capitol riots: in the former, the populist public were seeking to contest their opponent’s coup attempt, while in the latter, the rioters’ broadcast of their violent attacks and desecration of the Capitol made abundantly clear that their performance as ‘the people’ was intended to frighten and terrorise their opponents.
There might also be unintended audiences for populist publics’ self-mediation as ‘the people’. This is where the cases start to very clearly diverge due to the affordances of the technologies they relied upon. In a context where mobile visual technology enables anyone to broadcast anything at any time, broadcasters of self-mediation cannot necessarily control who is witnessing their performances. Unintended audiences may thus include groups who are able to curtail, discredit, or disprove populist publics’ visual claims to be ‘the people’. They may also include unsympathetic audiences with the ability to identify individuals within populist publics and impose sanctions for their actions, as well as powerful groups with the capacity to prosecute individuals for criminal activities.
This was certainly the case in the Capitol riots. The fact that those who stormed the Capitol livestreamed and documented their activities so comprehensively meant that they exposed themselves to a much wider audience than just ‘fans’, sympathisers, or even political opponents; their audience also included journalists and, more problematically for them, law enforcement. The New York Times, for instance, was able to identify rioters by using a data set provided by an anonymous source that had tracked their smartphone data. By drawing together location data and ‘pings’, geotagged photos on social networks, facial recognition, surveillance camera photos and footage, mobile advertising databases, and crowdsourcing, the newspaper was able to track individuals’ movements through the events and provide ‘what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day’.Footnote 97 Using similar methods, the investigative journalism website ProPublica drew on over 500 videos that participants had uploaded to the alt-tech social network Parler (prior to it being shut down) to create a remarkably detailed timeline of the events. In their analysis of the videos, they note
not only had we not seen something like this, but we had never been able to see any major civil clash in the way we did this one, thanks to a seemingly limitless trove of video documentation…not only were a great number of the participants using their smartphones to document themselves and their compatriots as they launched the attack, but many of them in turn shared the footage on Parler.Footnote 98
Similarly, law enforcement bodies were able to use footage and images captured by the rioters themselves on January 6th to identify individuals and lay criminal charges. The FBI posted images of rioters on a ‘Wanted’ page, which marked ‘the beginning of a large-scale information gathering process of crowd-sourced self-surveillant evidence used in rolling charges laid against the insurrectionists’.Footnote 99 Some rioters who posted their exploits were also identified and directly reported to law enforcement by people who knew them personally or on social media.Footnote 100 Moreover, rioters’ own images and videos were then used to implicate Donald Trump as the key inciter of the riot, since this footage (together with video from security cameras, media, and citizen journalists) was edited together in a 13-minute ‘supercut’ in the president’s impeachment trial.Footnote 101 By visually and electronically documenting their crimes, the rioters essentially created a compelling trail of digital and visual detritus for authorities to track them down, hold them accountable, and charge their leader.
This speaks to the back-and-forth dynamic between traditional media and digital technologies of self-mediation. It is key to note that the shift from the televisual to the digital in terms of populist self-mediation of ‘the people’ does not necessarily mean the traditional media filters or distributors have been usurped or disappear entirely – there are clear limits to the digital ‘self-mediation’ of ‘the people’. The examples above are evidence of this: traditional media was able to use self-mediated images and footage of ‘the people’ to track the rioters down and report on them. Self-mediated footage from the rioters were shown on network television. Moreover, the most recognisable images from the riots – the aforementioned QAnon Shaman and ‘podium guy’, for example – were noticeably not self-mediated: they were captured by well-established photojournalists (the Emmy-nominated photographer and filmmaker Ron Aviv and the Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Win McNamee respectively), and globally amplified by the likes of Reuters and the Associated Press. This indicates that we are still operating in what Chadwick has called ‘the hybrid media system’,Footnote 102 whereby amateur and professional forms of coverage and modes of distribution coexist and hybridise one another – but also that traditional forms of image capture and distribution may still hold the upper hand in terms of the making of iconic images.
What has changed in this regard across the cases, however, is the necessity of traditional media in mediating claims on behalf of ‘the people’. Both the Venezuelan and US cases saw populist publics with a highly antagonistic view of the mainstream media: in Venezuela, media networks were almost entirely owned by the conservative elite who were attempting to oust Chávez and were spinning the pro-coup message (or ignoring events entirely), and populist publics turned on them due to this. The Capitol rioters also demonstrated intense disdain for the media: Trump’s violent anti-media incitement was acted upon, ‘murder the media’ was scratched into a door of the Capitol building,Footnote 103 and at least 18 journalists were assaulted while covering the riots.Footnote 104 The difference is that the Venezuelan populist public were in some ways forced to fight their enemy on the latter’s terrain, whereas the Capitol rioters did not need to beg the mainstream media to broadcast their ‘peoplehood’; they had all the tools they needed in their pockets. As one rioter reportedly claimed, ‘we’re the news now’.Footnote 105 Hoechsmann summarises the situation effectively by situating the Capitol riots as ‘just beyond the crossroads of two media epochs, the outgoing hierarchical mass media model of the 20th century and the mobile, interactive, ubiquitous, algorithm-driven, participatory media model of the 21st’.Footnote 106 The Venezuelan coup belonged to the former epoch; the Capitol riots to the latter. In a relatively short time, the entire apparatus whereby populist publics could mediate themselves as ‘the people’ had completely and utterly shifted.
Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that visual self-mediations of ‘the people’ under populism have changed significantly over the past two decades due to the affordances provided by digital visual media technologies. Comparing ‘the people’s’ attempts to represent themselves visually across the events of the 2002 attempted coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots in the United States, I have tracked the shift from televisual mediation to digital self-mediation, and considered the ramifications of this shift in terms of audiences as well as consequences for those participating in attempts at such self-mediations.
There are numerous rich potential avenues for research opened up by this analysis. How might the visual self-mediation of populist publics overlap with wider discussions of ‘participatory culture’Footnote 107 or ideas about political ‘fandom’Footnote 108 in the digital age? What is the role of algorithmic social media in distributing and broadcasting such self-mediationsFootnote 109 – particularly in the current context in which social media owners such as Elon Musk have a direct line to government? And how can we determine if such self-mediations are ‘successful’? That is, while this article has considered aspects of the production and content of visual self-mediations, what about their reception or impact?Footnote 110 How might we go about measuring this and determining the effects of such populist self-mediations?
Moreover, the arguments made in this article are clearly not just relevant for those interested in populism: they are pertinent for thinking through how movements and collective political subjects visually represent themselves more broadly in a context in which one can easily and cheaply broadcast themselves participating in collective political action.Footnote 111 We are, as HoechsmannFootnote 112 above rightly notes, living in a different media epoch now, so taking note of how collective political subjectivities are formed, maintained, and broadcast through visual self-mediation is a key task ahead. Future research could potentially investigate if and how there are significant differences in the way populist versus non-populist movements attempt to do this – and as a result, if there are more or less pluralist ways to visually represent such political subjects. One potential distinction here might be that populist movements are focused on presenting a unified ‘people’ and thus playing down difference visually in the name of proving the solidity of the bonds between this group; whereas contemporary non-populist movements might instead stress the difference in their ranks as a way of acknowledging the pluralism of their movement. In short, populists want to represent ‘the people’; non-populist movements may not be making as wide a claim in terms of the political subject they purport to be visually representing. This also raises important questions about who is visually eligible to appear as ‘the people’ in different populist imaginaries – especially where whiteness, nativism, or class are implicitly coded as criteria for visibility. As this article has shown, even as technologies democratise the tools of self-representation, the boundaries of who can claim to stand for ‘the people’ remain deeply structured by race, nation, and history. Visually analysing movements along these lines would be a valuable path forward.
This analysis also invites a reconsideration of some foundational premises in the visual politics scholarship. Given that some of the seminal texts in this spaceFootnote 113 were written in a pre-mass smartphone era, it is crucial to theorise how the new era has not only expanded the means of image production but also reconfigured who can appear as a political subject, under what conditions, and through which platforms. As visual self-mediation becomes central to populist mobilisation, the aesthetic politics of legitimacy demand renewed theoretical attention.
These questions matter: visual technologies will become increasingly sophisticated and advanced, and thus continue to be central to political life more broadly. Populism is also not waning: as we have witnessed over past decades, although its success may be variable, it now very much a part of contemporary politics. As such, it is of vital importance that we understand the point at which these phenomena intersect and take seriously the dramatic changes in how populist publics self-mediate as ‘the people’ using visual technologies. Doing so will help make sense of the shifting sands of populist representation in a world marked by a visual or ‘pictorial turn’,Footnote 114 and perhaps enhance our understanding of what is to come.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525101241.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Dr Evelyn Rose, who provided invaluable research assistance and feedback for this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful and helpful reviews greatly improved it. This research was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award funding scheme [DE190101127].
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