Political Poster Adaptations on Twitter: Digital Culture, Media Logics and Mediatisation

Opportunities afforded through digital culture have changed the way citizens contribute to political discourse. Recent technological advances and the widespread adoption of Web 2.0 mean that through social media, regular citizens can communicate using a variety of mediums through a single channel.
Using UKIP’s 2016 Breaking Point poster as a case study, this research aims to understand how digital technology allows citizens to adapt party political posters and distribute them on Twitter. It also seeks to interpret how the meaning of these adapted images change throughout these iterations and to understand why they were created.

Media logics and mediatisation are both examined through the work as potential frameworks through which the creation of iterations and distribution of them on Twitter can be explained. Mediatisation through the course of this work relates to how non-media actors produce and distribute content which adheres to the norms of social media, representing the transformation of political practices and behaviour. Through analysing the Breaking Point poster, the research aims to address how mediatisation can explain why the subsequent iterations were created. Social media logics and network media logics are also both considered, as they complement the social media processes which take place on Twitter helping to identify mediatisation in the Breaking Point iterations.

To understand the roles of mediatisation and media logics on the iterations found on Twitter, a semiotic analysis has been completed for each iteration, looking at the denotation, connotations and anchoring as well as intertextuality and recontextualisation.

Through this research, the three key research areas of digital culture, media logics and mediatisation will be investigated to help explain how the iterations were created and why they were distributed on Twitter. As iterations made to be distributed on social media are analysed, the effects of social constructivist mediatisation become apparent alongside media logics and the influence of digital culture.