The Participatory Stance of the White House on Facebook: A Critical Multimodal Analysis

The digital revolution has led to the increasing hybridization of American political discourse with the language and the formats of the web, giving rise to a public/private narration where many communication codes merge and where different discursive voices are interwoven. Through the study of a qualitative dataset of messages posted on the “Timeline” section of the White House’s Facebook profile, the paper aims at examining the multimodal meaning-making strategies chosen to encode official messages with a special focus on the combination of words and images. More in detail, adopting a Critical Multimodal perspective (Machin and Mayr 2012; van Leeuwen 2013), the analysis will investigate the stance (Biber and Conrad 2000; Martin and White 2005) of the digitally remediated institutional voice (Askehave and Ellerup Nielsen 2005; Eisenlauer 2013) in order to explore whether such stance and its related textual practices are influenced by the postmodern, libertarian and play-oriented attitude typical of the so-called ‘hacker/geek’ culture (Coleman 2013; Konzack 2006).