Oldal 49 [49]
48 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
— =
4 Oe
The micro-narratives of some themes appear at certain intervals, while the
series of images related to Hungarian folk rituals are posted on social media
on consecutive days. Snapshots of the pig slaughter on Facebook followed
each other in a total of 17 posts between the 15" and 16" of January in 2022.
Typical visual stereotypes can be seen in the images of the three posts (Figure
3) that can be interpreted by all Hungarian users. This kind of redundancy
reinforces the message of the communication.
The media presence of political personalities and parties before the
emergence of Web 2.0 was achieved through the selection of gatekeeping
editors. On social media, however, politicians speak directly to the people
and have thus eliminated the process of editorial selection. In the last decade,
independent political parties and personalities have been more and more
present on social media, and their communication with the electorate takes
the form of compressed micro-narratives. As Szécsi puts it
[...] the most effective means of influencing social target groups are those
narratives that are best suited to conveying values and principles, and that
offer a continuous framework of interpretation for the target audience to work
through specific issues and problems [...]. Members of the new mediatized
communities are less and less interested in media narratives constructed from
the perspective of political communities, and are more interested in narratives
born in the world of social media (Szécsi, 2016, p. 103).
In social media, the communication of objective facts has less impact than
the sharing of emotions and personal opinions. The phenomenon can be
connected to the notion of post-truth which entered the public consciousness
after the 2016 US elections and the Brexit vote in the UK (Ramirez- Alvarado,
2020). In post-truth political communication, citizens are not convinced by
facts and competence, but by opinions, attitudes, and lifestyles, which are best
communicated through narrative structures and the channels of social media.
Politicians use influencer techniques to address citizens directly in short posts
instead of long rhetorical messages: they show how they reconcile their private
lives with politics, represent their everyday lives according to social norms