Social Media Discourse Characteristics And Strategies Of National Leaders From A Multi-Modal Perspective

With the development of social media,political leaders can communicate and interact with the public in real time,and political communication has entered a new stage of development.More and more national leaders are trying to expand their influence and shape a good personal image through social media.National leaders such as Indian Prime Minister Modi and former US President Trump have used different discourse strategies in social media political communication.These discourse strategies have prompted researchers to use a multi-modal perspective to analyze them.Multimodal discourse analysis can integrate different modal discourses such as text,image,video,etc.on the basis of traditional discourse analysis,and explore the meaning of discourse conveyed under their synergy.This thesis takes Modi’s English tweets as the research object.Based on the multimodal discourse analysis of his tweets,this paper discusses the following questions:What are the multi-modal discourse characteristics of Modi’s social media political communication? What is the relationship between different modal discourses in Modi’s social media communication? Take Modi as an example.What are the influencing factors of leaders’ social media discourse strategy choices? What’s the inspiration for us?Research has found that in terms of textual discourse,the conceptual process of Modi’s tweets is mainly realized through material and relational processes,using declarative tone and facts.In terms of picture discourse,Modi tends to use narrative to reproduce pictures,and more frequently uses reaction processes to express delicate feelings.In terms of video discourse,it is also mainly based on narrative reproduction of the video,where he directly expresses meaning to the audience through the speech process.From the perspective of the relationship between modal discourses,each modal discourse collaboratively constructs meaning.In general,Modi’s social media discourse strategy is to focus on rational persuasion in emotional expression,and to maintain pragmatic distance in order to achieve the political goal of creating a perfect idol.In addition,this thesis also combines the discourse expressions of world leaders and their governments on social media,and proposes to three-point optimization suggestions to promote the efficiency of social media political communication.These suggestions are: to reconstruct a concise and vivid discourse composition to cultivate users’ browsing habits;to fully understand and use the “hidden rules of social media”;to create highly recognizable personalized tags.