Political identity on the Net : David Cameron’s Blog

After migrating to Web 2.0, political communication has been ready to take advantage of the multiple semiotic resources of the web and the potentialities of digital genres, experimenting innovative ways of engaging citizens in politics. One of them is, doubtless, the growing popularity of candidate websites, by which politicians try to establish a direct relationship with prospective electors, constructing their mediated persona according to the marketing criteria of political branding. A pre-election video blog opened in September 2006 by the Conservative leader David Cameron and removed from YouTube by the Conservative Party in November 2013, Webcameron well exemplifies several of the strategies that inform the construction of a politician’s online identity. The site provided a behind-the scene approach to the Tory party leader’s busy life. By means of the multimodal synergy of text and image, the chosen rhetoric of representation constructed “David” as an indefatigable people’s servant, who wss apparently able to appeal to the entire country on a largely consensual political agenda. However, this approach, which is mostly based on personality and single issues, obfuscates a number of actual contradictions that neither the streamlined design of the website nor Cameron’s fluent style can fully address and tackle.