Facebook.com/WhiteHouse: a Multimodal Analysis of the Social-Media Recontextualization of the Institutional Encoder

In May 2009, the White House blog announced the creation of the official pages of the US government on platforms like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter in order to expand the ways in which the Administration communicated to the public. Such digital remediation of the White House’s voice leads to a reconceptualization of institutional discourse since it recontextualizes a formal, impersonal, top-down kind of discourse on informal, multisemiotic and peer-to-peer semiotic platforms. It also originates a form of hybridized textuality that merges different modes and codes of communication into a liminal public/private narration. The present chapter takes the preliminary steps in mapping the transformations undergone by US institutional language when ‘translating’ official messages using Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site. More in detail, it starts from the analysis of the main generic features of Facebook as a semiotic platform to focus on the meaning-making strategies chosen to linguistically and semiotically encode the image of the sender in the About section of the White House Facebook’s profile. The methodological framework adopted to decode this complex social, cultural and textual phenomenon encompasses a combination of Multimodal Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Web Genres Theory.