Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2017

This article explores the specific features of Instagram as a platform for visual political communication. Drawing on theories of mediatization and celebrity politics, it analyses how various forms of symbolic connectivity are expressed and performed by sixteen leading politicians in Sweden, and moreover how their social media use relates to news media. The study leans on a content analysis (n=800) and results show that journalism still holds a strong symbolic value, even when politicians are in charge of the political discourse. In addition, it reveals how the platform logic of Instagram contributes to the formation of digital lifestyle politics, where symbolic connections between politicians and a variety of actors are staged through new mediatized relations. Visual political communication does inherit a democratic and interactive potential. However, according to the analysed data, most politicians avoid public interaction. Instead, they are preoccupied with the branding of their public persona.

While there has been much research on how national politicians’ popularity is related to their participation in both traditional and social media, less research has been undertaken in order to understand the role of media for local politicians. In this article, we discuss how local politicians’ appearance in local newspapers, on Facebook and how their network of Facebook ‘friends’ can be explanation factors of their popularity in Norwegian local elections. The sample consists of 605 local politicians from two municipalities who were on the list of party candidates in these two municipalities in the 2015 election. Our findings show that the local newspaper is more important for the local politicians’ popularity than Facebook, but the politicians’ use of Facebook and numbers of Facebook ‘friends’ show a significant positive correlation with the numbers of preference votes the politicians receive. The effect of Facebook ‘friends’ on local politicians’ popularity shows the importance of connections, which again stresses the need for a greater awareness of the consequences of local politicians’ social networks both offline and online in local political processes.

The theoretical concept of translocal empowerment communication is developed in this article on the basis of an empirical study: the Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Networking Support Program was analysed as a case study of a translocal network of civil society actors whose aim is to empower marginalized women politically using media and communication technologies. The network was analysed using a qualitative approach, and Manuel Castells’ network metaphor was helpful to structure the findings and to uncover power structures within the network and the network and its environment. The concept translocal empowerment communication points on the one hand to the translocally mediated connectivity of civil society organizations striving for political empowerment of marginalized people through local media projects; on the other hand, it refers to power structures and inequalities that are produced by translocally mediated networks of civil society actors.

This article examines communication practices, specific genres and audio-visual narratives developed by Brazilian video activists in the context of the protests against the FIFA World Cup competition in 2014. Analysing 170 videos produced between June and July 2014, using digital methods, audio-visual analysis and the Lilleker and Vedel scheme crossed with the Carpentier model to analyse political participation, we try to reveal what level of participation these videos represent and to discover their political nature, classifying them by level of participation. In addition, this article will attempt to highlight that the videos worked as a source of information, debate and deliberation, promoting participation, which could generate more empowerment and participation if the activists improved contextualization and the quality of the narrative.

The way politicians ‘look’ is taken to be one of the essential aspects of the ‘mediatization’ and ‘professionalization’ of politics. Yet there is very little research about the role of image and self-presentation in political communication. This article presents the results of a study that aims to fill this gap by mapping where and how image fits within broader processes of identity and meaning construction in contemporary politics. On the basis of 51 interviews, it compares the role of personal image in the everyday political practices of both British and Italian local politicians and members of the European Parliament. The analysis develops an alternative conceptual framework to make sense of the role of image in twenty-first century politics, showing that the alleged deleterious effects of a ‘cult of appearances’ on democracy reflects more the narrowness of academic enquiry and the legacy of outdated linear models of politics-media relationships than the much more variegated and networked reality of contemporary politics.

Despite the major changes that have occurred in the ecology of media, this article considers mediatization to be still a concept valuable for grasping and interpreting relations among political communication actors. This article analyses the use of Twitter by politicians as evidenced by journalists’ accounts (and practices). In particular, it focuses on journalistic uses of Twitter in the context of political current affairs. This article investigates how and to what degree the use of social media has changed journalists’ practices in gathering political news. Moreover, it analyses how journalists describe politicians’ use of Twitter and how they reflexively conceive whether adjustments by those politicians to the media logic exist. To this end, the studies present results from 25 semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists occupying prominent roles within the Italian news organizations most important in terms of newspaper circulations and unique visitors to their websites. The research proves that mediatization is still an important framework within which to interpret practices in the new media environment.

In the last decade there has been a proliferation of academic studies examining the links between social networking websites (SNSs) and citizens’ political participation. Focusing on Facebook and on the specific contexts of Italy and the United Kingdom, this article adds to this strand of research and explores the limitations of this SNS as a political platform. The findings indicate three possible factors limiting the contributions of Facebook to political participation, namely, the non-universality of Facebook, its questionable credibility as a political information source and the enduring relevance of the offline dimension of political participation. In the light of these results, the article goes on to argue that the mobilizing force of Facebook rests, at least in part, on its connection with the offline world. Moreover, the research evidence underpinning this article suggests that the most effective way in which Facebook can aid political participation is, perhaps, by bridging the online–offline divide, integrating and supporting other media and offline activities.

This article analyses the representation of the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on the Instagram page nomfup, which is managed by Renzi’s spin doctor, Filippo Sensi. nomfup’s photos are frequently published in the Italian media, and thus contribute to the construction of Renzi’s public image. The article draws on Bourdieu’s perspectives on cultural production, on the cultural studies link between media and ideology, and on Barthes’ idea that photography relates to the past. Methodologically, it analyses nomfup’s photos through social semiotics, focusing on images depicting Renzi from the back and in black and white. The results show that first, when Renzi is represented from his back, the viewer sees the world as a Prime Minister does. Second, the images representing Renzi in black and white refer to the 1950s and 1960s, to the old Catholic party Democrazia Cristiana and to an idealized Italy still pre-modern and extraneous to Berlusconi’s excesses and scandals.