| Author: | Wu, Yuanzheng |
| Title: | Multimodality, social media, and discursive governance : a multimodal analysis of COVID-19 related news on TikTok in China |
| Advisors: | Feng, William (ENGL) |
| Degree: | DALS |
| Year: | 2023 |
| Subject: | Sociolinguistics Discourse analysis Social media COVID-19 (Disease) -- Social aspects Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Faculty of Humanities |
| Pages: | xi, 185 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The COVID-19 pandemic has been posing a long-lasting threat to humankind from the end of 2019 until the completion of this study. As the first country affected by the pandemic, China was under the stress of how to manage this public health crisis confronted with both domestic pressures and international accusations. The proper management of the pandemic calls for effective communication with the affected public, which is largely enabled by social media news (Wang & Yao, 2022; Yao & Ngai, 2021). In recent years, the fast development of social media has made it an important site on which the news media expand their influence and a more preferred platform on which people gain information. Its importance is particularly prominent during the pandemic when people were isolated at home and social media news serves as one of the most efficient channels for providing the latest updates about the ever-changing situation. Given the paramount role social media news plays during the pandemic, it is crucial to explore how it is strategically designed by the authorities to manage this public health in China. Previous discursive studies mainly focus on linguistic features of social media news, for example, evaluative expressions, engagement devices, and emotional stories (Wang & Yao, 2022; Wu & Pan, 2022; Yao & Ngai, 2021), however, few explore the abundant multimodal resources in social media news. To fill the gap, this study adopts a multimodal perspective to contribute to the existing discursive studies of social media news. Specifically, it draws on the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis through the lens of social semiotics to investigate how social media news is constructed with verbal and visual resources to perform its function of discursive governance. A corpus of 779 short video news posted by the account of CCTV News on TikTok is compiled. Three analytical frameworks are proposed to model the construction of social semiotic activities, the construction of China’s image, and the construction of delegitimization strategies. The analysis shows that social media news functions to govern the pandemic in three ways, namely, to accommodate multiple communicative purposes, to present a positive national identity of China, and to refute the accusation from the United States and represent a negative image of it. To be more specific, the analysis first reveals that in addition to the reporting activity, social media news also conducts sharing, recreating, expounding, and recommending activities. By accommodating different social semiotic activities in the news coverage, the news outlet serves the social, political, and educational functions in managing the public health crisis. Second, as to the representation of China’s image, three aspects of the positive image are represented, namely, China’s spirit, China’s strength, and China’s responsibility. By highlighting these favorable aspects, the news media seek to inspire the public to join in the fight, elicit people’s support towards China’s leadership, and maintain social stability in the face of a crisis. Third, delegitimization strategies are drawn on to delegitimize the United States’ accusations against China and its handling of the pandemic within the US society. In this way, the news media intend to resist foreign accusations, uncover the real intention of the accusation, protect China’s international reputation, and unite the Chinese people in the face of foreign hostility. This study sheds light on how social media news serves as a form of discursive governance and how it is discursively constructed to manage the public health crisis. Theoretically, it defines social media news as a form of discursive governance, which expands the scope of governance and provides a theoretical basis for authorities to exploit other institutional discourses and multimodal resources for social governance. Methodologically, it provides three analytical frameworks to map out the multimodal construction of social semiotic activities, the national image, and the delegitimization strategy. These frameworks can be applied to analyzing the multimodal construction of these aspects in other institutional genres and beyond the context of the pandemic. Practically, it provides several communicative strategies that can be applied to journalistic practice and education. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7076.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 2.61 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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