Performing Authenticity on a Digital Political Stage Politainment as Interactive Practice and (Populist?) Performance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2020.i15.589Keywords:
live stream, multimodal analysis, politics, populism, style, videoAbstract
This article investigates the way politicians use social networking sites as
effective communication platforms to discursively enhance authenticity, sincerity and (self --)connection to what can be defined as the “People” (followers/lurkers/net users). Within the framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, and using tools c oming from Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the paper analyses the multi semiotic elements used by different political leaders (i.e. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Matteo Salvini), to connect with the “People,” and discusses the politainment product as a perso nalised way to skip the institutional mediation channels of politics.
References
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Norris, Sigrid. Analysing Multimodal Interaction: A Methodological Framework . London:
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Salisbury, Meredith and Jefferson Pooley. “The #nofilter Self: The Contest for Authenticity among Social Net working Sites, 2002 2016.” Social Sciences 6.10 (2017): 1-24.
Shane, Tommy. “The Semiotics of Authenticity: Indexicality in Donald Trump’s Tweets.” Social Media + Society 4.3 (2018): 1-14.
Sorensen, Lone. “Populist Communication in the New Media Environment: A Cross regional Comparative Perspective.” Palgrave Communication 4.48 (2018): 1-12.
Sorensen, Mads. “Political Conversations on Facebook The Participation of Politicians and Citizens.” Media, Culture and Society 38.5 (2016): 664-685.
Taggart, Paul. Populism. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2000.
Thompson, John B. “The New Visibility.” Theory Culture and Society 22 (2005): 31–51.
Thompson, Mark. Enough Said. What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics. London: Bodley Head, 2016.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Vacariu, Mihai and Diana Gavra. “The Impact of Videos in the Online Political Communication.” International Conference RCIC 2017. http://www.afahc.ro/ro/rcic/2017/rcic%2717/NMCI/327
332%20Vacariu%20Gavra.pdf. Last visited 30/11/2019.
Van Dijk, Teun A., edited by. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. 2 Vols. London: SAGE, 1997.
---. “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” The Sociolinguistics Reader Volume 2: Gender and Discourse. Edited by Jenny Cheshire and Peter Trudgill. London: Arnold. 1998. 367-391.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008.
---. “What is Authenticity?” Discourse Studies 3.4 (2001): 392-397.
Veum, Aslaug and Linda Victoria Moland Undrum. “The Selfie as a Global Discourse.” Discourse & Society 29. 1 (2018): 86-103.
Waisbord, Silvio and Adriana Amado. “Populist Communication by Digital Means: Presidential Twitter in Latin America.” Information, Communication and Society 20.9 (2017): 1330-1346.
Wiles, Peter. “A Syndrome, not a Doctrine: Some Elementary Theses on Populism.” Populism. Its Meanings and National Characteristics . Edited by Ghiţă Ionescu and Ernest Gellner. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969. 166-179.
Wodak, Ruth, edited by. Language, Power and Ideology . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989.
---. The Politics of Fea r: What Right Wing Discourses Mean . London: SAGE,
Abidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying
Young Digital Labor.” Social Media Society 3.2 (2017): 1 15.
Bossetta, Michael. “Fighting Fire with Fire: Mainstream Adoption of the Populist Political Style
in the 2014 Europe Debates between N ick Clegg and Nigel Farage.” The British Journal
of Politics and Internal Relations 19.4 (2017): 715 734.
Castells, Manuel. “Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society.” International Journal of Communication 1 (2007): 238-266.
Chen, Chia Chen and Yi Chen Lin. “What Drives Live Stream Usage Intention? The
Perspectives of Flow, Entertainment, Social Interaction, and Endorsement.” Telematics
and Informatics 35.1 (2018): 293 303.
Coleman, Stephen. “Representation and Mediated Politics: Re presenting Representation in an
Age of Irony.” Political Communication in Postmodern Democracy: Challenging the Primacy of Politics. Edited by Kees Brants and Katrin Voltmer. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 39 56.
Colic Peisker, Val and Adrian Flitn ey. The Age of Post Rationality. The Limits of Economic
Reasoning in the 21st century . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
De Vreese, Claes, Frank Esser and Toril Aalberg. “Populism as an Expression of Political Communication Content and Style: A New Perspective.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 23.4 (2018): 423-438.
Demata, Massimiliano. “’I Think that Maybe I Wouldn’t Be Here if it Wasn’t for Twitter.’ Donald
Trump’s Populist Style on Twitter.” Textus 31.1 (2018): 67 90.
Dumitrica, Delia. “Politics as ‘Customer Relations:’ Social Media and Political Authenticity in
the 2010 Municipal Elections in Calgary, Canada.” Journal of the European Institute for
Communication and Culture 21.1 (2014): 53 69.
ELAN, Build 5.2. [Computer software.] Nijimegen: Max Plack Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive. https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan. Last visited 20/05/2020.
Ekstrom, Mats, Marianna Patrona and Joanna Thornborrow. “Right Wing Populism and the
Dynamics of Style: A Disc ourse Analytic Perspective on Mediated Political Performances.”
Palgrave Communication 4.83 (2018): 1 11.
Engesser, Sven, Nayla Fawzi, and Anders O. Larsson “Populist Online Communication: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Information, Communication & S ociety 20.9 (2017): 1279 1292.
Enli, Gunn. Mediated Authenticity: How the Media Constructs Reality . New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 2015.
---. “Twitter as Arena for the Authentic Outsider: Exploring the Social Media Campaigns of
Trump and Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election.” European Journal of Communication 32.1 (2017): 50 61.
Enli, Gunn and Linda Therese Rosenberg. “Trust in the Age of Social Media: Populist Politicians Seem More Authentic.” Social Media + Society 4.1 (2018):1 11.
Ernst, Nicole, et al. “Extreme Parties and Populism: An Analysis of Facebook and Twitter across Six Countries.” Information, Communication & Society 20.9 (2017): 1347 1364.
Fairclogh, Norman. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language . London:
Longman, 1995.
Gaden, Georgia and Delia Dumitrica. “The ‘Real Deal’: Strategic Authenticity, Politics and
Social Media.” First Monday 20.1. (2015).
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4985/4197 Last visited 01/04/2019.
Gerbaudo, Paolo. “Populism 2.0: Social Media Activism, The Generic Internet User and Interactive Direct Democracy.” Social Media, Politics and The State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Edited by Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs. London: Taylor and Francis, 2014. 67-87.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1956.
Gumperz, John. “Interviewing in Intercultural Situation.” Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Edited by Paul Drew and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 302-307.
Halliday, Michael A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold, 1994.
KhosraviNik, Majid. “Populist Digital Media? Social Media System and the Global Populist
Right Discourse.” Public Seminar 28 October 2019.
https://publicseminar.org/2019/10/populist digital media social media systems and the
global populist right discourse/. Last visited 01/05/2020.
---. “Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM CDS).” Handbook of Critical Discourse
Analy sis. Edited by John Flowerdew and John Richardson. London: Routledge, 2018b.
582 596.
---. “Social Media Techno Discoursive Design, Affective Communication and Contemporary
Politics.” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences (2018a): 1 16.
Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 2006.
Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005.
Liogier, Raphaël. Ce populisme qui vient . Paris: Textuel,
Mazzoleni, Gianpietro. “Populism and the Media.” Twenty-First Century Populism. Edited by Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 49-64.
Moffitt, Benjamin. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and
Representation . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.
Montgomery, Martin. “Post-truth Politics? Authenticity, Populism and the Electoral Discourses
of Donald Trump.” Journal of Language and Politics 16.4 (2017): 619 639.
Mudde, Cas. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
---. “The P opulist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39.4 (2004): 542 563.
Nixon, Paul G., Dan Mercea and Rajash Rawal. “Introduction.” Politics and the Internet in Comparative Context. Views from the Cloud. Edited by Paul G. Nixon, Rajash Rawal, and Dan Mercea. London: Routledge, 2015. 1-25.
Norris, Sigrid. Analysing Multimodal Interaction: A Methodological Framework . London:
Routledge, 2004.
Riegert, Kristina and Sue Collins. “Politainment.” The International Encyclopedia of Political
Communication . Edited by Giampietro Mazzoleni. New York: Wiley, 2016. 974-984.
Rossetti, Giovanni. “Matteo Salvini and the Potentials of Facebook Live Stream.” Masters of Media, 2018. https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2018/09/24/matteo salvini and the potentials of facebook live stream/ Last visited 30/11/2018.
Salisbury, Meredith and Jefferson Pooley. “The #nofilter Self: The Contest for Authenticity among Social Net working Sites, 2002 2016.” Social Sciences 6.10 (2017): 1-24.
Shane, Tommy. “The Semiotics of Authenticity: Indexicality in Donald Trump’s Tweets.” Social Media + Society 4.3 (2018): 1-14.
Sorensen, Lone. “Populist Communication in the New Media Environment: A Cross regional Comparative Perspective.” Palgrave Communication 4.48 (2018): 1-12.
Sorensen, Mads. “Political Conversations on Facebook The Participation of Politicians and Citizens.” Media, Culture and Society 38.5 (2016): 664-685.
Taggart, Paul. Populism. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2000.
Thompson, John B. “The New Visibility.” Theory Culture and Society 22 (2005): 31–51.
Thompson, Mark. Enough Said. What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics. London: Bodley Head, 2016.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Vacariu, Mihai and Diana Gavra. “The Impact of Videos in the Online Political Communication.” International Conference RCIC 2017. http://www.afahc.ro/ro/rcic/2017/rcic%2717/NMCI/327
332%20Vacariu%20Gavra.pdf. Last visited 30/11/2019.
Van Dijk, Teun A., edited by. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. 2 Vols. London: SAGE, 1997.
---. “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” The Sociolinguistics Reader Volume 2: Gender and Discourse. Edited by Jenny Cheshire and Peter Trudgill. London: Arnold. 1998. 367-391.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008.
---. “What is Authenticity?” Discourse Studies 3.4 (2001): 392-397.
Veum, Aslaug and Linda Victoria Moland Undrum. “The Selfie as a Global Discourse.” Discourse & Society 29. 1 (2018): 86-103.
Waisbord, Silvio and Adriana Amado. “Populist Communication by Digital Means: Presidential Twitter in Latin America.” Information, Communication and Society 20.9 (2017): 1330-1346.
Wiles, Peter. “A Syndrome, not a Doctrine: Some Elementary Theses on Populism.” Populism. Its Meanings and National Characteristics . Edited by Ghiţă Ionescu and Ernest Gellner. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969. 166-179.
Wodak, Ruth, edited by. Language, Power and Ideology . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989.
---. The Politics of Fea r: What Right Wing Discourses Mean . London: SAGE,
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