Instagram as a Platform for Presenting Various Forms of Subjectivity in Political Communication

Authors

  • Neven Obradović Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, Serbia

Keywords:

political communication, Instagram, subjectivity, politicians, political parties, state officials

Abstract

Every politician, either a state or a party official, acquires the status of a political subject in political communication. In the case of party officials there is a double subjectivity, since the subjectivity of a political party, as a group, is in the background of the subjectivity of the officials who communicate and represent them in public. As far as state officials are concerned, there are three types of subjectivity: the first is the subjectivity of the state officials as individuals, the second is the subjectivity of the party through which they accomplish their party goals, and the third is the subjectivity of the state authority and them being their members (Slavujević, 2009). Thanks to its global popularity, Instagram, a social media platform, has oriented political subjects toward the concept of visual communication with citizens, as well as towards adjusting different forms of subjectivity to this social media. In this segment of the empirical research, the author analyzed the Instagram account of the president of the 12th convocation of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia. Ivica Dačić, as an official of the highest representative body and the holder of the constitutional and legislative power, but also the president of the Socialist Party of Serbia, the second strongest parliamentary party in the convocation of the Assembly constituted after the 2020 parliamentary elections. The content analysis method included a sample of a total of 100 posts on Instagram between July 23, when the account was activated and November 23, 2021. The main research questions are: 1) What type of subjectivity is the most represented on the profile?; 2) Do the posts contain emotional and humanizing segments or simplified photographs aimed at representing a political subject as “the people’s man”? The findings of the research indicated that in his Instagram posts, the president of the Republican House of Representatives and the president of the Socialist Party of Serbia has expressed all three types of subjectivity in political communication. Among them, the most represented is the subjectivity of the state authority that he represents, followed by the subjectivity of the political party and finally, the personal subjectivity particularly containing an emotional and humanizing segment aimed at creating the image of “the people’s man”.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Downloads

Published

2022-12-01

How to Cite

Obradović, N. (2022). Instagram as a Platform for Presenting Various Forms of Subjectivity in Political Communication. Media Studies and Applied Ethics, 3(2), 7–20. Retrieved from http://msae.rs/index.php/home/article/view/43