La politica si fa immagine: la narrazione visual del leader politico = Politics becomes an image: the visual narrative of the political leader

Abstract

Politics becomes an image: the visual narrative of the political leader. In contemporary political communication, the practice of simplifying the message and the political context has found an excellent tool in the realization of a dialogic flow that is exhausted in the communicative power of the leader and in the personalized narrative of his political project. In a digital and crowded communicative context, the leader emerges realizing the "emotional horizontality" of the dialogue: the message is framed in an emotional context that flows from the leader to the public and from the public to the leader in a constant exchange, which in turn it feeds on emotional sharing and cognitive simplification of themes and frames. The goal is to "connect", through the emotional context, the leader with his audience. Thanks to social networks, the images have found a new expressive and communicative centrality as variously combined visual elements, they are able to build and maintain an emotional and cognitive link between the participants in the communication. Politics also seeks to exploit the conversational power of images to give emotional depth to personalized narratives of leaders. In political storytelling, the image is an increasingly central part of a discourse focused on the leader and on the narration of his political action: the visual statement constitutes a portion of the discourse, making the semantic and emotional richness of images available to the story.