“In front of you”: public figures and personal images in the digital arena

The visual storytelling of politics and its effects

Abstract

Politicians have started to inhabit social media platforms to build their public images and contribute towards directing political debates in peer-to-peer contexts. We argue that their growing social media presences potentially contaminate both the language of politics and more dynamic, less-structured and unconventional voices, typical of the platforms. Social media can act as a stage for the presentation of everything from great ideological themes to personal contents without losing rhetorical and propaganda power. In this paper we investigate practices of political storytelling by sharing images in order to focus our readers’ attention on the deliberate construction of relationships between politicians and their voters. We propose a qualitative content analysis of visual contents shared on Instagram by four European prime ministers. We compare their communication styles, tones of voice, and strategic use of the pictures on the platform.