AbstractsPolitical Science

Barack Obama`s Presidential Governing on the internet: Web 2.0 and the pervasiveness of political language

by Anna Ivanova




Institution: Universidad de Sevilla
Department:
Year: 2012
Record ID: 1129423
Full text PDF: http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/oaites?codigo=26527


Abstract

This dissertation gives a new perspective on the language of the Internet in the 21 ... rif"; font-size: 8pt">st century. In previous CMC studies this language stood for a system of signs employed for communication by means of information transmission from screen to a user. In most cases, this system was presented in the form of a written text, i.e. the term �language of the Internet� was limited only to its textual component. However, given the rise and development of Internet technologies in new millennium, I claim that �language of the Internet� is not only about words used during online communication, it is also about the flow of this communication. Being invisible, non-physical substance, this process occurs mostly at unconscious level, and up to these days, it was (and it is) part of Human-Computer Interaction, mainly, usability studies, which focus on the ease of information retrieval from a website as part of its pre-launch testing. This dissertation proposes to extend the notion of �language of the Internet� that has overstepped its textual limits and comprises a broader meaning in the context of modern Internet technologies. This evolution of language on the Internet is demonstrated using Barack Obama�s presidential governing online. The choice is caused by his revolutionary election campaign in 2008 that converted him into �the first Internet President� of the United States. As Greengard, (2009) puts it: �Barack Obama�s presidential campaign utilized the Internet and information technology unlike any previous political campaign. How politicians and the public interact will never be the same� (p. 16). Thus, the main aim of this thesis is to give a description of Barack Obama�s presidential governing online from two different perspectives: Human-Computer Interaction and Corpus Linguistics, and their combination is claimed to form Obama�s discourse online. For the attainment of this goal, the thesis addresses the following main objectives: 1. To analyze and describe the structure, information distribution and its retrieval from Barack Obama�s official website Organizing for America. 2. To analyze and describe Barack Obama�s online language through the analysis of his main rhetorical appeals and deictic references on Twitter platform. The first objective is achieved using Human-Computer Interaction theoretical background. The dissertation does not attempt to give a profound technical analysis of Obama�s website neither it is aimed at comparing it with another site; rather, the purpose to study Obama�s website is merely to demonstrate the other facet of language of the Internet. The dissertation analyzes how the text is distributed on a visually framework (the static approach) along with its hyperlink organization (the dynamic approach). In doing so, I believe we can understand better how the online discourse is structured. To discover whether this structure is effective, the dissertation has adopted a method inspired in Web Design and Computer Sciences which consists of experimentation in usability…