Language of Power: Cultural Narratives and Technological Mediums in Modern Politics
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
In the modern world, political power is not limited to institutions, laws, and authority. It is now a combination of cultural stories and technology. Politics is not just about governance but about storytelling that creates identities, evokes traditions, and moves people together. Public narratives like nationalism, religion, and historical memory contribute to constructing public consciousness and validating authority. When these stories are amplified with digital tech, they reach unprecedented scale and influence. Political communication is undergoing a transformation through the explosion of social media, data-driven campaigns, and algorithmic personalization. They allow leaders to get around traditional gatekeepers and communicate directly with citizens.
At the same time, visual and symbolic politics - memes, videos, hashtags - have reduced political discourse to a simple, emotive message. While this mixture of culture and technology creates the possibility for greater political participation by more people, it also introduces issues: misinformation, polarization, and digital manipulation. This article explores the way in which contemporary politics employs cultural symbols and technology in the construction of power, demonstrating its transformative opportunities and the threat these pose to democratic discourse.
Article Details
Section
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
References
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). Verso.
Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. Oxford University Press.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Pantheon Books.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers.
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962)
KhosraviNik, M. (2018). Social media techno-discursive design, affective communication and contemporary politics. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 11(4), 427–442. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0226-y
Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso.
McNair, B. (2018). An introduction to political communication (6th ed.). Routledge.
Mounk, Y. (2018). The people vs. democracy: Why our freedom is in danger and how to save it. Harvard University Press.
Shirky, C. (2011). The political power of social media: Technology, the public sphere, and political change. Foreign Affairs, 90(1), 28–41.
Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.
Wardle, C., & Derakhshan, H. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking. Council of Europe.
Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118760317
Chadwick, A. (2017). The hybrid media system: Politics and power (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Engesser, S., Ernst, N., Esser, F., & Büchel, F. (2017). Populism and social media: How politicians spread a fragmented ideology. Information, Communication & Society, 20(8), 1109–1126. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1207697
Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press.
Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: How the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. Penguin.
Taggart, P. (2000). Populism. Open University Press.
Tambini, D. (2021). Social media power and election legitimacy. Social Media + Society, 7(1), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305121997067
Van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The platform society: Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.