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Part II. Storytelling in the Information Age ] 49 and gender stereotypes, and sometimes even include humorous elements. Such posts are powerful tools to convince citizens that the politician is one of them. At the same time, communication via social media allows citizens to express their opinions with reaction buttons or comments. However, participation and communication are illusions; although politicians" messages on social media give the appearance of direct, personal discourse, they actually represent infotainment and aim to attract attention and achieve engagement (Hernández-Santaolalla, 2020) in aphenomenon that Nieland (2008) calls politainment. Another narrative strategy used by politicians, especially during campaign periods, is to incorporate the plots, memes, and twists of currently popular HBO or Netflix series into their communication, reflecting the intertextual aspect of politainment. This is illustrated by Spanish political parties’ use of visual and audiovisual meme references to the series Game of Thrones (Bellido-Pérez & Donstrup, 2020). Such posts have a compressed narrative but also provide an opportunity for interpersonal contact and a discussion of shared experiences. Social media allow content creators and content recipients to be accessible to each other and to communicate directly, satisfying their need for social connectivity. Micronarratives thus also engage participants in a shared media rite of passage. These posts do not merely communicate that a politician has eaten a sausage or slaughtered a pig; the information is situated in a wider symbolic context. This type of communication can be interpreted in light of Csaszi’s (2002) theory of media rites. Csdszi interpreted media rites in Durkheimian terms, arguing that media place events taking place in a physical space and time in the symbolic space and time of rites, thus giving cultural meaning to social phenomena. Popular media, and thus the hybrid world of social media, allow the beliefs and norms of a community to become manifest in this way. The social rituals that appear in social media storytelling offer the possibility of direct connection and shared moralization. Micronarratives evoke emotional attachment and identification with, or even denial of a particular value system and have the power to maintain and shape identity. Social media communication by political actors can be likened to an extended interactive election campaign. In the micronarratives, narrative structures emerge that are based on the restoration of moral order, and on the representation of actions that can be associated with the hero. Negative rites of passage are also evoked in political social media communication: posts with scandalous events involving opponents receive almost immediate publicity. The presentation of deviance in relation to the party’s values is intended to provoke the dissociation of users. Identification or dissociation can be expressed by the user through reaction buttons, comments or by sharing the content and thus promoting it to his or her own circle of acquaintances. These individual shares are then followed by further reactions, so that storytelling continues through the act of repetitive sharings. Despite the fact that storytelling continues on social media as users reflect on the
