Multimodal discourse analysis of Barack Obama’s Social Networking Site (SNS) “Facebook” account

ABSTRACT

Social Networking Sites become an important media to convey messages and propaganda nowadays. These days, many people do interactions through social media. The functions of social media increase as people realize that it is quite easy to promote something on social media, especially Facebook. From this phenomena, the researcher decides that the study of Barack Obama’s Social Networking Site (SNS), Facebook account, is a worthy study to do.

This study is aimed to analyze the arrangements, functions, and messages in the multimodality of Barack Obama’s Social Network, Facebook account. The focus is on the health insurance issue which is promoted by Barack Obama, in the certain range of time of the post through Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). By analyzing 12 posts which are divided into three themes, the main purpose of the study is to reveal the way of message delivery, the function, and the message of the posts through the combination of texts, pictures, and hyperlinks.

The present study utilizes the descriptive qualitative method since the purpose is to interpret and look deeper into a case. In descriptive qualitative research, the data are analyzed qualitatively without using any statistical methods. Besides that, two approaches are utilized, image and visual design approach and contextual approach. Under three major themes, the posts are categorized into three major themes; the advantages of health insurance, affordable price, and limited purchase time. Each theme consists of 4 figures, and 12 figures in total. Since the posts on Facebook are not merely in the form of text, but also pictures and hyperlinks, Multimodal Discourse Analysis is an appropriate method to do. It uses the theories of MDA by Kress and van Leuween (2006) which are actually rooted from Halliday’s theory of Systemic Functional Linguistic. Besides that, it also uses hypermodal analysis following Lemke’s (2002) theory since the posts also contain some hyperlinks.

The result of the study shows the different use of the texts, pictures, hyperlinks and their functions. The pictures or the photographs are functioned as the illustration of the text above them. It means that the photograph is to support the text which precede them. While, The texts with different lengthalso have different functions. The short texts which are placed before the picture is functioned as decoy for the reader to follow the hyperlinksAnother kind of text is also found, it is hash tagged texts. While, the colors are arranged properly according to the theory of color in marketing strategies.The main messages are actually not far from their major theme above. However, the messages are all emphasized through supporting aspects. Because MDA always need other area of studies, it is very possible to add other studies reference. Since the present study is about Barack Obama’ Facebook account and its promotion strategies on health insurance, the future study may be conducted in other media such as television and publications.