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Abstract

The year 2016 was marked by two political events which shocked many experts in media, academia and politics: the victory of the Leave vote in the United Kingdom’s European Union membership (Brexit) referendum, on the 23rd of June, and the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States of America, on the 8th of November. Besides sharing similarities as cases of ascendant populist nationalism, these events were also both characterised by the adept use of social media Internet platforms; in particular, through the generation of attention by controversy and through algorithmically-enhanced individually-targeted online advertising.
This dissertation explores how the pro-Leave and Trump campaigns utilised social media to their advantage, by analysing literature concerning their respective employment of social media strategies, and by investigating the cases through the ‘Laws of Media’ – an analytical framework from the field of Media Ecology, developed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Media Ecology approaches communication technologies as active forces in human culture, which do not merely transport information but transform it in distinct ways. In this dissertation, the ‘Laws of Media’ are applied to the case of Facebook during the Brexit referendum campaign and the case of Twitter during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election campaign, to understand how these media each transformed political campaigning by enhancing, obsolescing, retrieving and reversing certain aspects of communication.
This study found that (in slightly different ways) both Facebook and Twitter enhanced audience participation; obsolesced central publishing authority; retrieved a sense of tribal community; and reversed into ‘post-truth’ narrative confusion. These general transformations were of significance in both political contexts, in that the victorious parties in each case exhibited a better understanding than their rivals of the character of social media and how to employ social medias’ transformations of communication to their political advantage.

Course: International Relations and Politics - BA (Hons) - C0694

Date Deposited: 2021-03-11

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13683.html