Political Communication Online

Ognyan Seizov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317815563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The impact of the Internet on political communication has been significant and multifaceted: it expanded the reach of political messages; opened the floodgates of decontextualization and intercultural misunderstanding; made room for new genres and forms; and allowed for the incorporation of every previously existing communication mode into complex multilayered documents.

Political Communication Online places these developments in their social and media context, covers various disciplinary backgrounds and how they can contribute to a common understanding of the evolving online media landscape, and proposes a novel methodological tool for the analysis of political communication online. Seizov offers an approach that places context at the core of the theoretical and methodological discussion by discussing the traits of online communication that make it a unique communication environment. The book then brings together different disciplines which have important contributions for the study of political communication online but have not been integrated for this purpose so far, such as visual communication, multimodal research, and cognitive psychology. Seizov introduces the book's main theoretical and methodological contribution to multimodal document analysis, the annotation scheme "Imagery and Communication in Online Narratives" (ICON), and explores how the ICON approach works in practice. Taking four distinct genres of online political communication – news, election campaigns, NGOs, and social movements – the book presents the analyses of convenience samples from each of them in detail.

This text features a comprehensive theoretical discussion of vital current developments in online political communication, places these developments in context, and couples that with a practical demonstration of the novel methodology it proposes.

1
Political Communication Online

A Field in Flux

Political communication as a research field is going through major changes, both in terms of scope and method. What was once the discrete study of campaign materials or news coverage is now forced onto a fast track towards analyzing any media artifact which is even “barely political” (after the famous ObamaGirl YouTube channel from 2007–2008), as Richardson, Parry, and Corner (2012) note in their volume on political culture beyond the news. The quick expansion of the field is driven by technological innovation in the professional practice of political PR, as well as by the growing active involvement of the wider public in the creation and exchange of political messages (e.g. Coleman, 2001). These developments invite novel scholarly approaches that are in pace with the changing parameters of political communication. This also implies looking at political communication outside its traditional manifestations. Richardson et al. (2012) call for going beyond the news and explore print cartoons, politically flavored talk shows, and the blogosphere, among other less commonly scrutinized communication channels. The wider inclusion of such complex data sources, however, necessitates the development of similarly complex analytical methods.

One side of the complexity associated with political communication online is the increase in interactivity and the ample opportunities audiences have to make the jump from receivers to participants in a virtual dialogue. Nowadays, the average member of the media audience is anything but passive, producing as much content as he or she consumes. This is the main quality of the media “prosumer” (e.g. Bianco, 2009; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). The term merges “producer” and “consumer,” and it has been in use in the market research context since the 1980s (e.g. Toffler, 1980; Kotler, 1986). Bruns (2007, 2008) uses the term “produsage” to denote a similar phenomenon, especially in the context of Web 2.0, an environment built upon an “architecture of participation” (O’Reilly, 2007, p. 17). Nowadays, with the advent of the Internet as a major communication medium, prosumers occupy a central place in the creation and distribution of content (Comor, 2011). The literature on the subject draws a direct link between the prosumer movement and the political economy of capitalism. This puts the phenomenon firmly in a Western context and links prosumers’ growing numbers to, among other environmental features, widespread online access. As individuals become more and more interconnected—as they join the “network society” (e.g. Castells, 2000, 2005)—sharing texts, visuals, and the meanings they carry has hardly been as easy, painless, and quick. Nevertheless, this ease of communication brings along a number of challenges.

Comor (2011, p. 309) notes that “both mainstream and progressive analysts conceptualize prosumption to be a liberating, empowering and, for some, a prospectively revolutionary institution.” Indeed, Toffler (1980), the term’s originator, believed prosumption would bring about nothing short of a new, better human civilization. However, the phenomenon is not without its pitfalls, especially in the field of mass communication, which is in focus here. In particular, Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010, p. 13) point to the trend towards amateur, unpaid, and abundant content generation within a system where scarcity used to be the norm. While “scarcity” and “abundance” are relative terms in the mass communication context, the implications of the statement are that mass media are losing their monopoly over the generation and dissemination of information, and that this happens rapidly at the hands of prosumers who produce content and make it ready for consumption, all for free (or at negligible personal expense)—something professional mass media cannot hope to match, economically speaking. In the context of the mass audience’s “feeding frenzy”—the constant hunger for more news even if none exists—online media prosumption surely sounds like a blessing. However, amateur production and especially amateur dissemination can have significant and far-reaching consequences, involving topics of crucial importance such as social responsibility, fact checking, and reporting bias, to name but a few.

Toffler’s vision of prosumption was always technology centered; according to Comor (2011, p. 312), the revolutionary potential of this new socioeconomic phenomenon is locked inside the technology itself (i.e. networked computers). Indeed, computer networks grow massively, and the constraints of the online canvas shrink by the minute as new platforms, new functionalities, and new tools emerge. This myriad of fresh communication opportunities begins to penetrate all spheres previously dominated by the “traditional” media. Political communication, on the battle for “hearts and minds” since its inception in the early 1800s (e.g. Müller, 1997), has also moved online and established itself firmly in this new environment in the past 15–20 years—virtually since the World Wide Web became available to the masses in 1990 (Zakon, 2010). As political persuasion and political discussion took to the Web, hopes for informed, two-way communication between campaigners and constituents grew (e.g. Coleman, 2001; Endres & Warnick, 2004). Simultaneously, there appeared fears that the status quo of sleek, “professional” campaigns, which tend to ignore interactivity and dialogue, would merely transfer into the new medium (e.g. Foot & Schneider, 2002; Gibson & Römmele, 2001; Xenos & Foot, 2005). Research is still on the fence about the benefits, costs, and pitfalls of online political communication. A range of analyses look at various aspects of political participation and information spread online: from social determinants of participation (e.g. Best & Krueger, 2005; Gibson, Lusoli, & Ward, 2005) to campaign creativity in using online tools (e.g. Druckman, Kiefer, & Parkin, 2007; Farnsworth & Owen, 2004), to purely Internet-based political systems with their own rules and values (Gueorguieva, 2008; Howard, 2005; Ward, 2005).

Prosumption is the first crucial component at the heart of this book’s empirical and theoretical offering. The rapid infusion of amateur or semi-professional content into online communication channels necessitates a comprehensive media-analytical toolbox. So far, it has been possible and in fact widely accepted for scholars to focus on a single communication mode because high levels of professionalization (e.g. Hallin & Mancini, 2004) provide reasonable guarantee that the combinations of text and image at the center of a media artifact have been carefully crafted to carry an unambiguous message. With that axiomatic conviction, it was easy to draw conclusions about campaign strategy and style or about journalistic bias. When we tread into prosumer territory, however, the guarantee does not hold anymore. The nature of mass prosumption is heterogeneous, international, and heavily contextualized. Under these conditions, it is not enough to analyze the text or the visual only. While media professionals may be expected to streamline their communicative effort and to integrate their visual-verbal messages, prosumers are neither trained nor constrained to operate in this way. Rather, they let their own competences and strengths shine through their composition choices; thus, looking at the whole picture is key to yielding representative results, for both prosumer and professional political communication in the context of the World Wide Web.

Media hybridization is another source of inspiration and direction for this book. Hybridization has been present in numerous forms within the social sciences. The very first use of the term “hybrid” comes from ancient times; in Latin, it was used to denote the crossbreeding between “a tame sow and a wild boar” (Young, 1995, p.6). With time, the term has grown in scope tremendously and, indeed, has become one of the “emblematic notions of our era” (Kraidy, 2005, p.1). In its purist sense, hybridity refers to cultural exchange and sociocultural change in general, and numerous scholars have worked on the problem:

Indeed, a coterie of thinkers have written about cultural exchange and mixture, including Argentinian-Mexican cultural theorist Nestor Garcia-Canclini (1989), Spanish-Colombian media scholar Jesus Martin-Barbero (1993), Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), French historian Serge Gruzinski (1999) and French philosopher Michel Serres (1969, 1972, 1974, 1977, 1980), French Guyanese literary critic Roger Toumson (1998), Saudi sociologist and novelist Turki al-Hamad (2001), and Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-I Ahmad (1984) (Kraidy, 2005, p. 3)

Hybridity in the mass-media context retains a very strong bond with culture and transculturality, to the extent that Berger (2009) claims the demarcation lines between local, foreign, and international news are fading. Much of the extant body of research on this phenomenon is bound to the theory of cultural imperialism (e.g. Boyd-Barrett, 1998; Morris, 2002; Baird-Olson, 2003). However, here we leave much of the ideological debate aside in favor of a practical approach to hybridity, one centered on the amalgamation of previously separate communication modes into monolithic media artifacts. The Internet presents the opportunity to fuse communication modes seamlessly, but this is also a challenge for both producers and researchers who must bridle this newly found media complexity.

One way to fathom the process of media hybridization is to conceptualize it through convergence. According to Appelgren (2004, p. 239), “in 1997, the European Union presented a definition of convergence suggesting two possible uses of the concept, the first one being the possibility for many types of networks to distribute principally similar services and the second one being the merging together of different electronic appliances such as telephones, television sets and computers” (emphasis added). The growing co-deployment and effective merging of different communication modes into single cohesive multimodal documents also comes with a slow but steady fusion of traditional and new media—print, TV, and online outlets share an increasing number of visual features nowadays (e.g. Cooke, 2005). It is also plain to see that the Internet as the medium of choice has taken over all defining features of traditional media and transformed them into its own palette of multimodal communication patterns. This development presents a formidable challenge to media scholars, and novel methodologies that can handle high levels of context complexity need to be developed.

Research Questions and Goals

As prosumption and media convergence grow in prominence within the field of online political communication, research is pressed for time and resources to keep up with the beat of technological innovation. Studies and theories center on the textual messages propagated by campaigners or bloggers, the tone of political news coverage, or the pictures from political events that appear on television and in the press. Each of these aspects of political communication, on- and offline, has been researched to varying extents, and a few have been studied comparatively as well. The next step, therefore, is an integrated multimodal approach for analyzing political communication, one that encompasses numerous communication modes present in a single document (visual—still and/or moving, textual, audio, layout) and takes into account each of their contributions to the meaning-making process. This development is a natural continuation of all the work that has been done in the field of online political communication research so far. An approach like that would unify and streamline previous efforts into thorough and telling analyses that command even more explanatory power.

This book offers a contribution to the above goal. It tackles the following research questions:

1. How do the different communication modes (visual and verbal) interact in the multimodal documents examined?
2. How do the different communication modes relate to meaning-construction patterns of the content?
3. How do political websites contextualize their content visually and verbally?
4. Are there clearly identifiable medium- and genre-specific patterns of multimodal interaction?

The relationship between the research questions is linear. The answers to the first two questions stem directly from the empirical component of the monograph, which proposes a novel multimodal annotation tool for politically flavored online media. Testing that tool sheds light on visual-verbal interaction and tests the boundaries of the new methodological construct. The findings generated there assist in tackling the third research question, where semantic interactions are embedded in the larger theoretical frame of context. Conceptualization practices grow in both importance and complexity, and they become especially relevant in the case of new media. After generating systematic knowledge about what visual and verbal elements are present in the data, it is paramount to embed this knowledge in its proper contextual settings and further inform the interpretations and conclusions of the first two research questions. Finally, the fourth research question looks for media and genre dependencies. This endeavor is made easier by answering the previous research questions because they aim to provide a thorough, positive, and contextual overview of the data. Therefore, they set the stage for preliminary generalizations and conclusions about the structures, functions, and challenges that characterize political communication online in its manifestations considered here. This sequence of research questions also serves as one viable blueprint for multimodal media analysis, one where visual and verbal semantic elements are first categorized, then contextualized, and finally embedded into tentative typologies, which can then be tested through further investigation. Such a stepwise procedure is well suited for the challenge of constantly evolving media phenomena, due to the systematic principles that govern it and at the same time allow for all necessary amendments that play a role at each level. This means of organization keeps the system in check and makes sure that tweaks at any one analytical stage affect all further analyses as well.

For the purposes of the project, “political websites” are exemplified here by the online presence and presentation of: a) political news, b) election campaigns, c) political and media-related NGOs, and d) social movements. The selection of political websites also aims to tap into the prosumption phenomenon that was already introduced at length. These and other research design decisions are explained in the following chapters. Some of these research questions have been asked, in part or in full, about offline political communication before. However, transferring answers across media is not an option, particularly with the booming development that we see in online communication technologies. While the challenge of the constantly evolving technological landscape remains a formidable one, it is not too ambitious to aim at an analytical model that offers a sound understanding of the semantics involved in online political communication. The present volume proposes one such comprehensive solution. To realize it, it borrows theoretical and methodological considerations from political communication, visual communication, iconography, systemic-functional linguistics, and multimodal document analysis. This array of disciplines and methods is thoroughly explained further on, and strong arguments are made for their interrelation and powerful combination.

Research Design Across Disciplines and Modes

Robert Yin (2009) defines research design “colloquially [as] a logical plan for getting from here to there, where here may be defined as the initial set of questions to be answered, and there is some set of conclusions” (p. 26). The research design “guides the investigator in the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting observations” (Nachmias & Nachmias, 1992, p. 77). The empirical component of this book takes the form of a series of exploratory case studies in the field of online political communication. Yin (2009) identifies the case study design as especially suitable for answering “how” questions, and the book’s guiding research questions take this form almost entirely. Each case study involves the multimodal analysis of a particular genre of political website, which explores and then systematizes its visual-verbal meaning-making mechanisms. Therefore, the unit of analysis (e.g. Ragin & Becker, 1992) is the political communication website, since the research questions revolve around similarities and differences between these entities (Yin, 2009), either individually or united by their common genre (e.g. campaign website, online news, etc.). Finally, the findings from all case studies are discussed comparatively, genre-specific and inter-genre typologies are fleshed out, and a preliminary evaluation of the new multimodal annotation scheme ensues. The results are then set into the larger framework of the book, namely, the structures, functions, and challenges lying before political communication online in the new media environment of the 21st century. Naturally, all findings correspond to one or more of the research questions posed in the previous section and illustrate the overall methodological construct of mutual dependency, which this book singles out as most viable for research into current and constantly evolving media fields.

The design has to be of an exploratory nature due to the relative novelty of the research topic. As such, it throws a wide net, figuratively speaking, in order to get preliminary data from four major varieties of political communication outlets online and to paint a general picture of the visual-verbal relations that dominate each subgenre. This book is as much an empirical investigation as an exercise in theory building and method testing. Theory development is a central characteristic of case studies, which sets them apart from related methods, such as ethnography (e.g. Lincoln & Guba, 1985) or “grounded theory” (e.g. Corbin & Strauss, 2007). Robert Yin (2009) emphasizes the importance of “field contacts [which] depend upon an understanding—or theory—of what is being studied” (p. 35). The book follows this advice. It has a solid foundation in already existing research fields and methods, as outlined in the following chapters, but it also aims to take a step in a new direction by presenting a new theory of multimodal document analysis and testing it empirically. Therefore, a good exploratory analysis of the status quo against the proposed methods and theories is the necessary first move to solidify the ideas and approaches proposed here.

The concrete research steps involve theory development ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Political Communication Online: A Field in Flux
• 2 ICON: A Visual Approach to Multimodality in Political Communication
• 3 Investigating Political Communication Online: Analytical Levels and Procedures
• 4 Political Communication Online at a Multimodal Glance: General Trends and Characteristics
• 5 News and Campaigns: Findings From Two Traditional Genres of Political Communication
• 6 NGOs and Social Movements: Political Communication With Social Origins
• 7 Moving Forward: Evolving Genres and Future Research Directions in Political Communication Online
• Works Cited
• Index