Presidential Communication in the Twitter Era

The idea that “popular or mass rhetoric has become a tool of presidential governance” (Tulis 1987,p. 4) has been imposing itself for over fifty years, but after the technological revolution in communication the notion of rhetorical presidency has undergone important changes. The advent of the Internet has provided politicians and parties with new expressive possibilities allowing them to avoid the moderating influence of traditional media. The latest trend in digital communication is social media, a group of Internet-based applications that promote online participation; in order to show that it moves with the times, the American presidency has been an early adopter of social media tools. In particular, microblogging has been implemented as a new communication mode. This paper examines the distinguishing features of microblogging and demonstrates that they can be exploited to turn this subgenre into an efficient tool of presidential communication. The official pages of the White House and of the American President Barack Obama on the leading microblogging platform Twitter are investigated in this study as they are microblogs utilized as a means of rhetorical presidency. The theoretical framework of genre analysis (Swales 1991; Bhatia 1993) is applied in this paper to the abovementioned Twitter accounts as semiotic objects as well as to the alphabetical texts deployed in them as language objects (Garzone 2007, p. 16). References BHATIA, VIJAY K. , Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings, London, Longman, 1993. GARZONE, GIULIANA, “Genres, Multimodality and the World Wide Web: Theoretical Issues” in Garzone, Giuliana, Poncini, Gina, and Catenaccio, Paola (eds.), Multimodality in Corporate Communication. Webgenres and Discursive Identity, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2007, pp. 15-30. SWALES, JOHN, Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. TULIS, JEFFREY K., The Rhetorical Presidency, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1987.