Abstract
ABSTRACT In his contribution to the Special Issue “Digital and semiotic mechanisms of contemporary populisms”, Jan Blommaert offers a communicability model which accounts for political discourse (and others) in the post-digital era we live. He starts by arguing that the idea of the public (a homogeneous entity) that was very popular in the 20th century sociological imagination of how propaganda worked in “manufacturing consent” can no longer be used to explain the fragmented audiences of our post-digital era. The author illuminates his argument by resorting to the circulation of political tweets/retweets as texts in our algorithmic-oriented world. Such a circulation aims at niched audiences. In the last section, the author argues that discourse analysts need to operate from this communicability model if they are to understand the cruciality of political discourse in our contemporary social lives.
Highlights
In his contribution to the Special Issue “Digital and semiotic mechanisms of contemporary populisms”, Jan Blommaert offers a communicability model which accounts for political discourse in the post-digital era we live
The so-called ‘digital revolution’ has already happened, it has become ‘historical’ according to Florian Cramer (2014), and we have entered a ‘post-digital’ era in which big-tech innovation is matched by grassroots searches for agency, DIY media creation and hybrid media systems. This has profoundly affected the flows of information in societies such as ours, and we need to get our heads around these new ways in addressing their outcomes: messages, meanings and the social configurations within which they circulate
Various versions of propaganda models have been predominant in critical discussions of mass media and politics throughout the 20th century2, and they informed much early and influential work in Critical Discourse Analysis as well (e.g. FAIRCLOUGH, 1989). These models are grounded in a modernist imagination of ‘the public’ and the public sphere, in which ‘the public’ is usually seen as ‘the masses’
Summary
Propaganda models are linear models of political mass communication, in which the messages and meanings of powerful actors – politicians in this case – are passed on to ‘the public’ by mass media owned or operated by actors sharing the same interests as those articulated by the powerful actors. Various versions of propaganda models (the most widely known one is HERMAN; CHOMSKY, 1988) have been predominant in critical discussions of mass media and politics throughout the 20th century, and they informed much early and influential work in Critical Discourse Analysis as well (e.g. FAIRCLOUGH, 1989) These models are grounded in a modernist imagination of ‘the public’ ( the scare quotes I put around this term) and the public sphere, in which ‘the public’ is usually seen as ‘the masses’. The propaganda models that were so predominant in public discourse analysis need to be fundamentally revisited, because two of their key elements have been dislodged: mass media in the 20th century sense, and the public sphere in the modernist sense outlined above They have been replaced by complex systems of communication aimed at micromarketing. An adequate understanding of the contemporary political system requires another sociological imagination (cf. BLOMMAERT, 2018b), for the one we tend to carry along in our analyses reflects a political process that might have been accurate in the 20th century, but no longer corresponds to the field that prevails today
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