Synthetic personalization of Barack Obama at the 2008 US Democratic National Convention: a social semiotic multimodal analysis of a staged political context

Abstract

This article sets out to investigate how represented social actors can be related multimodally to addressees in political contexts that are staged specially for public and media consumption. Drawing on Van Leeuwen’s theoretical assumption in Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (2008) on the different kinds of ‘symbolic’ relations that can be constructed between represented social actors and viewers, and Lemke’s (1998) view, cited by Jewitt in The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (2009), on the different ways resources from different semiotic modes can ‘interact’ with one another within a multimodal ensemble, this article adopts a social semiotic approach to the multimodal analysis of the staged political context of the 2008 US Democratic National Convention, focusing its analysis, in particular, on the multimodal construction of relations between Barack Obama and the American people viewing the event. In an area in which very little research on the multimodal construction of relations between represented social actors and addressees in staged political contexts has been done, this article provides a starting point for the understanding of this discursive phenomenon and, in so doing, makes an original and significant contribution to the fields of social semiotics and multimodality.