Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 49 views

    Jan Blommaert On Political Discourse in Post

    Uploaded by

    Daniel Silva
    The document discusses Jan Blommaert's article "Political discourse in post-digital societies" which analyzes how communication technologies have radically transformed political discourse. Blommaert argues that the traditional linear model of political messaging no longer applies, as roles and channels of communication are more fragmented across polycentric public spheres composed of niche audiences. Politicians can now directly target customized messages to segmented groups, while algorithms and machines also produce political messages. This new polycentric model requires new approaches to understand the changing bases of political action in digital societies.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Jan Blommaert On Political Discourse in Post

    Uploaded by

    Daniel Silva
    49 views2 pages
    The document discusses Jan Blommaert's article "Political discourse in post-digital societies" which analyzes how communication technologies have radically transformed political discourse. Blommaert argues that the traditional linear model of political messaging no longer applies, as roles and channels of communication are more fragmented across polycentric public spheres composed of niche audiences. Politicians can now directly target customized messages to segmented groups, while algorithms and machines also produce political messages. This new polycentric model requires new approaches to understand the changing bases of political action in digital societies.

    Original Title

    Jan Blommaert on political discourse in post

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    The document discusses Jan Blommaert's article "Political discourse in post-digital societies" which analyzes how communication technologies have radically transformed political discourse. Blommaert argues that the traditional linear model of political messaging no longer applies, as roles and channels of communication are more fragmented across polycentric public spheres composed of niche audiences. Politicians can now directly target customized messages to segmented groups, while algorithms and machines also produce political messages. This new polycentric model requires new approaches to understand the changing bases of political action in digital societies.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    49 views2 pages

    Jan Blommaert On Political Discourse in Post

    Uploaded by

    Daniel Silva
    The document discusses Jan Blommaert's article "Political discourse in post-digital societies" which analyzes how communication technologies have radically transformed political discourse. Blommaert argues that the traditional linear model of political messaging no longer applies, as roles and channels of communication are more fragmented across polycentric public spheres composed of niche audiences. Politicians can now directly target customized messages to segmented groups, while algorithms and machines also produce political messages. This new polycentric model requires new approaches to understand the changing bases of political action in digital societies.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    You are on page 1of 2

    What is the interference of communication technologies in politics today?

    Daniel Silva

    Jan Blommaert published in a special issue on populisms that I edited for Trabalhos em
    Linguística Aplicada the article “Political discourse in post-digital societies”. In it, he
    offers insights for some of the perplexities that democracies in the world are facing. The
    U.S.A., the UK, and Brazil, for instance, have opted for leaders (like Trump and
    Bolsonaro) or political movements (like Brexit) that deny established models of
    political debate, introduce new vocabularies in politics, and promise to emulate the
    voice of the “people”.

    Blommaert, in the article “Political discourse in post-digital societies”, published in a


    special issue on populisms in Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada (vol. 59, no. 1),
    proposes that, in order to understand the radical transformations in the ways in which
    politics is articulated today, it is first necessary to abandon the traditional models of
    political propaganda. Grounded in modernist imaginations about the workings of
    language, these traditional models imagined that the transmission of political messages
    was linear: the message would originate from the politician, who, through the mass
    media, would relay the message to their audiences. However, the increasing
    digitalization of life and communication renders this linear model unsustainable (see
    also Maly, 2020; Varis, 2020; Bonnin, 2020, and Cesarino, 2020 in the special issue).

    Neither the senders of the message, nor the media, nor the receivers are the same any
    longer: Blommaert observes that these roles and channels are much more fragmented,
    monetized and distributed, which has been afforded by the very architectures of the new
    media. For example, audiences today are broken down to segments based on
    demographic data, preferences, and routines harvested by platforms. This allows
    politicians to tailor messages to accordingly niched audiences, in addition to translating
    harvested "likes" into economic value. Besides, these niched audiences are increasingly
    ephemeral and dynamic, and may themselves become producers of political messages.
    In this "polycentric" view of communication, machines themselves also become
    producers of political messages. As Ico Maly (2020) suggests, the interaction between
    politicians, publics and algorithmic actors transforms the very notion of populism.
    Algorithmic populism thus becomes the "digitally mediated communicative relation
    between different human and algorithmic actors" (Maly, 2020).

    Blommaert points that this polycentric model requires a new sociology and a new
    linguistics if we are to understand the new bases for political action. The very public
    sphere is sectorized and polycentric, composed of audiences that use different normative
    systems, which explains the fact that (what certain audiences would see as) gaffes,
    errors, verbal truculence, or indexical icons of little education are valued by other
    audiences as indicating authenticity and satisfactory change. This process of
    enregisterment (Agha, 2007) has turned itself into the political capital that in part
    responds to the rise of politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro (see Silva, 2019).
    Blommaert finally points in his paper to productive paths for the analysis of
    contemporary political discourse.

    References
    Agha, Asif (2007) Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University
    Press.

    Blommaert, Jan (2020) Political discourse in post-digital societies. Trabalhos em


    Linguística Aplicada 59(1), 309-403. Retrived from: https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?
    script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-18132020000100390&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

    Bonnin, Juan Carlos (2020) Rethinking populist discourse from Latin America:
    Algorithmic activism and the constitution of a people in Chile. Trabalhos em
    Linguística Aplicada 59(1), 469-490. Retrieved from: https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?
    script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-18132020000100469&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

    Cesarino, Leticia (2020) How social media affords populist politics: Remarks on
    liminality based on the Brazilian case. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada 59(1), 404-
    427. Retrieved from
    https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-
    18132020000100404&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

    Maly, Ico (2020) Algorithmic populism and the datafication and gamification of the
    people by Flemish Interest in Belgium. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada 59(1), 444-
    468. Retrieved from https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-
    18132020000100444&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

    Silva, Daniel (2019) Enregistering the nation: Bolsonaro’s populist branding of Brazil.
    To appear in I. Theodoropoulou & J. Woydack (eds) Language and Country Branding.
    London: Routledge. Retrieved from:
    https://www.academia.edu/39723047/WP252_Silva_2019._Enregistering_the_nation_B
    olsonaros_populist_branding_of_Brazil

    Varis, Piia (2020) Trump tweets the truth: Metric populism and media conspiracy.
    Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada 59(1), 428-443. Retrieved from:
    https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-
    18132020000100428&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

    You might also like