A Digital 'Meeting Place'? A Socio-semiotic and Multimodal Analysis of the WhiteHouse.gov Social Hub

Since the beginning of his first mandate, President Obama was committed to expanding the ways in which the Administration communicates with the public. A commitment that was evident in the original restyling of the White House website (which was modelled after Obama’s highly interactive 2008 campaign page) and that resulted in the flow of institutional messages on social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and, the latest of them, Tumblr. In order to facilitate access to this huge and (almost) daily updated amount of information, the Obama Administration created a section in its institutional website, named “Engage and Connect” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/engage), the aim of which was both to ask for citizens’ participation and to serve as a “social hub” to the official pages, that were created on the different platforms. The present paper aims at linguistically and semiotically mapping the main discursive strategies used by the White House under Obama's Presidency to frame its image as “the most open and participatory administration in history”. More specifically, using instruments derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Multimodality, the author investigates the communicative and textual structure of the “social hub” page to show how the White House creates and promotes trust and social media participation.