Multimodal Communication, Politics and Social Media: Verbal and Visual Language in Donald Trump’s Facebook Page

The Multimodality Satellite of Language@Leeds will be hosting this research talk by Massimiliano Demata Università di Bari

According to a multimodal view of meaning, language is no longer considered central in the communication of meaning in the written form. Rather, multimodality involves the simultaneous use of different semiotic systems, such as language, layout, images, etc., to create and communicate meaning. Facebook is made by units of meaning, such as “posts”, which are constituted by the interaction of verbal and non-verbal modes. While verbal language is still central in the users’ experience of Facebook, non-verbal semiotic systems, such as visual images, are becoming increasingly central in the scope of the social platform. Meanings “are shaped by the norms and rules operating at the moment of sign-making, influenced by the motivations and interests of a sign-maker in a specific social context” (Jewitt 2013, pp. 15-16). On the basis of this assumption, this talk will discuss how social meanings are encoded in Trump’s Facebook page, and how relations of power are played out in it.

Biosketch:

Massimiliano Demata is Assistant Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Bari, Italy. He took his DPhil in English at St Cross College, Oxford in 1999 and was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Yale University (1999) and Indiana University (2014). In 2008 he published his monograph, Representations of War and Terrorism. The Ideology and Language of George W. Bush. He has published extensively on the language of British and American media
and politics, Computer-mediated communication and translation and ideology. His current research focuses on social media and Multimodality in the context of American politics.