While on Facebook only little more than 50 percent of images are self-made and depict the candidate, on Instagram nine out of ten visuals are original content, and two-thirds of them show the politicians who own the profile.

Hence, we describe (1) individualization in personalized visual communication as application of visual tools that highlight candidates in a rather formal way (e. As for cross-posted images, the characteristics of these are more similar to Instagram than Facebook visuals, as they generally feature more informal and fewer formal elements. Furthermore, it refers to “connectivity” ( Ekman and Widholm 2017) through depicting “candidates” on their own, with “other politicians,” “family members,” or “ordinary citizens. No significant relationship can be found on Instagram, but this may be due to the fact that on this platform, almost all pictures are self-made, so the variance of this variable is low.The reason is that we do not think that the same coding scheme can be applied for images and videos.

These range from colorful expert graphics, model visualizations, photographs of extreme weather events like floods, droughts or melting ice, symbols like polar bears, to animated and interactive visualizations.

The title itself, “Politics of the Image”, refers to this potential and extends far beyond the actual political arena to all cultural fields – business, science, education, religion, art and sports. On Facebook, creating a connection between ordinary users requires reciprocity by default, while on Instagram one-sided following is the way to connect with someone. Visuals have important added value to politicians’ Facebook posts with their more personal and emotional features, and the presence of personalization is higher in the case of politicians’ Facebook posts that contain visuals than those without visuals ( Metz et al. Widely televised environmentalist actions are analyzed in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. But despite campaigns attempting to tap into the political currency of pictures, different content forms elicit different emotional responses.