Visualization of Digital Genres: Instagraming in English Political Communication

The article depicts the emergence of a new digital hybrid genre –instagraming.The research objective is to analyze the design of the genre Instagram at the text level and to determine the main linguistic and non-linguistic features of the genre design in the field of English political Internet-communication. Research methods and techniques.The material of the research includes 144 English publications obtained from the official accounts of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson. The qualitative and quantitative methods are used in the research namely: the methods of information analysis, synthesis, comparison, linguistic description,content analysis, and the semantic-syntactic method. The Voyant Tools program is used for data analysis. The content analysis of publications of the political leaders of the USA and UK on Instagram shows the difference in the number of their posts which indicates different attitudes of the politicians and their teams in the use of the social network when achieving their political goals. The genrestructure depends on the development of information technology, as well as on the type of device into which it is entered and which affects the order of heading placement, the format of the page, as well as the position of a text comment in relation to a video or photo. Results and discussion. The results obtained testify that both verbal and nonverbal constituencies of instagraming present inseparable parts of this genre. It is possible to speak about the hybridization of the digital genre as an inseparable feature. Conclusions. One can state that instagraming might be considered as a sort of container of multiple texts, combining video, audio and picture semiotic systems together. Additionally instagraming is rendered as a Goroshko, O., Poliakova, T. (2022). Visualization of Digital Genres:Instagraming in English Political Communication.Social Communications: Theory and Practice,Vol.14(1),148–163.DOI: 10.51423/2524-0471-2022-14-1-9149eISSN 2522-9125 pISSN 252—0471https://new.comteka.com.ua/subgenre providing communicativespace for various genres of political communication on the Net. One can argue that social media genre research requires the combination of linguistic and paralinguistic methods of analysis that develops a methodological base for linguistics 2.0 –a new approach in linguistic and communication studies of the ХХІ century.Keywords:digital genre, genre 2.0, Instagram, instagraming, social media, visualization, English-speaking political communication.