Reformulating political discourse: How politicians construct their identity in the Facebook era

This study investigates the way one of the most popular SNSs – i.e. Facebook – affects the construction of politicians’ identity in British/American English and Italian political discourse. The aim is to compare traditional genres of political propaganda, such as electoral campaign speeches and inaugural addresses, with the innovative genre of SNSs. The attention is on the linguistic means and rhetoric/discursive strategies that politicians use to construct their identities on Facebook, as compared to the features traditionally discussed in Political Discourse Analysis (PDA, van Dijk 1997; Chilton 2004). The study is divided into four main sections. Section 2 briefly describes the methodology used for data collection. Section 3 explores the genre of SNSs in the pertinent literature and elaborates a set of emergent discursive features that stress their role in the processes of conversationalisation and popularisation of political discourse. Section 4 instead discusses the linguistic characteristics of more traditional political genres (van Dijk 1997), and compares them to the more innovative features of Facebook profiles. The fifth section examines such profiles from the cross-cultural viewpoint, and from the viewpoint of their social impact on the audience.