Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to outline my version of a style analysis which focuses on a comprehensive and integrative investigation of multimodality and genre elements in social media contexts. With this type of analysis, I aim to explain how personalization and aestheticization become dominant elements of organizational communication in the private–public context of social media. Style, therefore, is considered as an important element of creating institutionality—which is understood as a ‘fugitive’ authority of and within the institution of an online community that speaks not only through its words but also through the impression that it performs. This practice can be understood as a subjectification effect of a social media dispositif. In my approach I emphasize this institutionalized interplay of media and semiotic affordances in the public face work of social media communicators. I illustrate this methodological reflection by analysing the style performed in the YouTube video entitled ‘The destruction of the CDU’ by the German social media influencer Rezo—a video that triggered a debate which, for a short while, was echoed not only in social media but also in traditional mass media and politics.
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Notes
- 1.
Online-document: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ, 3 March 2021.
- 2.
Online-document: stern.de: https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/philipp-amthor--cdu-politiker-zeigt-ausschnitt-seines-antwort-videos-an-rezo---dann-wird-es-peinlich-8914518.html, 3 March 2021.
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Meier, S. (2022). Style as Discursive Practice in the Multimodal Construction of Identity: Towards a Social Media Dispositif Analysis. In: Porsché, Y., Scholz, R., Singh, J.N. (eds) Institutionality. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96969-1_10
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