Digital communication has revolutionised politics. The importance of political information and propaganda spread on new media has outgrown that of traditional media. The elections of Barack Obama (called by many “the Facebook President”) and Donald Trump (“the Twitter President”) are seen as evidence of the influence played by social media in mobilising the electorate. If the media have changed (and are continually changing), so verbal and visual modes of expression within political communication. Elaborating on the analytical perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (including Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis), Prof. Demata will discuss some of the linguistic and non-linguistic strategies employed by American politicians in the new media environment.

Massimiliano Demata is Assistant Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Bari, Italy. He took his DPhil in English at St Cross College, Oxford in 1999 and was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Yale University (1999) and Indiana University (2014). In 2008 he published his monograph, Representations of War and Terrorism. The Ideology and Language of George W. Bush. He has published extensively on the language of British and American media and politics, Computer-mediated communication and translation and ideology. His current research focuses on social media and Multimodality in the context of American politics.