Narrative of politics in the era of social media: a multimodal analysis of president Joko Widodo’s video blog

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the use of social media in constructing political narrative by examining the video blogs (vlogs) of Indonesian President, Jokowi, on Youtube as a case study. How does President Jokowi use his vlogs to construct political narratives about his personal life and presidency? What kind of semiotic resources deployed in his vlogs? This research uses the method of Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis and concludes that President Jokowi has used his vlogs to build his political narrative with the underlying themes of progress and reformation, stating that his presidency will lead Indonesia to a better situation. The political narrative championed in his vlogs strengthens his political legitimacy as a leader who is humble, modest, and close to the people. In building his political narrative, President Jokowi has used a variety of semiotic resources, including participants, process or kinesics action, locative circumstance, visual collocation, speech, and text. This research confirms the change of political communication in content dimension and shows the importance of applying multimodal analysis in understanding contemporary political communication. This research recommends politicians to use vlogs as a platform to build their political narratives in this new political environment.