Why Trump won the elections

Abstract

In this article I would like to focus on the dialogical transformations that the use of social media has introduced into political discourse, showing why they have an increasing relevance on the whole landscape of our contemporary political arena. In order to do that, I will analyse their semiotic functioning, and the way in which they have transformed the traditional dialogical structure, still present in other forms of technologically mediated communication. Finally, I will advance some hypothesis on how these transformations can favour the growth of populism, a phenomenon that should concern anybody interested in dialogue, since populism represents precisely the death of any form of dialogue.