This paper investigates one specific aspect of impression management (self-presentation as an ordinary person) of the candidates during the 2016 Austrian presidential campaign on Twitter and asks whether the candidates’ campaigns followed the innovation or the normalization hypothesis. By applying Goffman’s concepts of “giving” vs. “giving off” information to the affordances of political communication on Twitter, a communicated ordinariness strategy is distinguished from a staged ordinariness strategy. Different forms of these two strategies are identified in the candidates’ tweets by investigating the pictorial and verbal elements of their tweets. Results show that both strategies are employed rather infrequently in all but one of the candidates’ tweets. Only one of the candidates used a staged ordinariness strategy during one phase of the campaign. These results show that most candidates employed communication strategies which conform to the normalization hypothesis rather than to the innovation hypothesis. Furthermore, the results suggest that following a consistent communication strategy throughout an entire campaign might ultimately lead to electoral success.
In line with theories of charismatic leadership (Weber 1947, Shamir et al. 1994), and drawing on Goffman’s approach (1959) regarding impression management as well as on Sacks’ concept (1984) of (extra)ordinariness as a work done through discourse, this study defines and analyzes a discursive practice employed by Israeli PM Netanyahu in his public talks, namely the construction of an image that on the one hand, all citizens can identify and empathize with, and on the other, presents him as so unique as to be irreplaceable. The examples demonstrate the stylistic, discursive and thematic aspects of Netanyahu’s public discourse on the background of culture-specific norms and expectations.
The analysis identifies two types of ordinariness that Netanyahu communicates to the audience: The positive ordinariness that Weizman and Fetzer (2018) associate with the fulfillment of civic duties, and being “all-Israeli” in the sense of being an average, down-to-earth member of Israeli society.
Prime Minister’s Questions is the central British parliamentary institution. Every week Members of Parliament have the opportunity to pose questions to the Prime Minister, frequently utilising quotations from various sources, e.g. allies from the quoter’s political party, political opponents, experts, or ordinary people. The focus of this contribution is on the strategic use of quotations from ordinary people in the interchanges between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The data comprise 240 question-response sequences. In the sequences analysed, quotations make up 9% of the total word count for Cameron-Miliband and 10% for Cameron-Corbyn: 2% of the quotations are sourced by ordinary people in the Cameron-Miliband data, and 31% in the Cameron-Corbyn data. Corbyn’s systematic use of quotations from ordinary people was novel, foregrounding their political issues and assigning them the status of an object of discourse in the media thus making the government accountable to them.
The chapter examines readers’ comments on a Facebook post in which the Israeli politician Yair Lapid positions himself as an ordinary person. Based on Sacks (1984), it is argued that such positioning is characterized by themes, perspectives, and communicative patterns typical of ordinary people, rather than political-public authorities.
An examination of 141 relevant readers’ comments shows that, in Bakhtin’s terms, there are three main readings of such ordinary voice: A single-voiced reading, which views the ordinary voice as legitimate, authentic, and independent; a double-voiced reading, which views the ordinary voice as authentic and legitimate, but as partial; and a polyphonic reading, which views the ordinary voice as fictitious, illegitimate, and designated to promote a political agenda. The paper discusses the communicative patterns of each category in comparison to those of the original post, and examines the effect of these patterns on the positioning of both Lapid and his readers.
Radio call-in shows, mainly political ones, are prevalent in discursive research, dating back to Hutchby’s influential work. This chapter discusses the leading United States economic self-help radio call-in show, “The Dave Ramsey show” and how ordinariness is used in it. The host, Dave Ramsey, advises callers, and the audience, regarding their economic behavior. This counseling creates a paradox: an expert-millionaire advises ordinary people and fans regarding their economic struggles. The host presents himself as ordinary to solve this paradox. Ramsey constructs his ordinariness using vernacular language, referring to a shared ‘common-sense,’ using mundane stories and relating to the callers as a family. Then, the chapter discusses two interactions with “non-ordinary” callers, a poor and a rich caller, to show the uses of the ordinariness practices in them. The conclusion connects the ordinariness of the host to his neoconservative ideology, to point to the notion of ordinary success he tries to deliver.
Science journalism entails an orientation to the interests and understandings of ordinary audiences. The key challenge for journalists is to present the research reported as newsworthy and translate complex findings to understandable terms. This study examines interviews with scientific experts conducted in the Israeli current affairs program London et. Kirschenbaum, focusing on discursive strategies used by presenters to align with the interests and knowledge of their audiences. The doing of “being ordinary” emerges as a key resource for allocating the translation of scientific knowledge between expert guests and the presenters themselves. In doing so, they are shown to shift between knowers or ignorants of the topic reported in a way that reflects their public personae and their task of making science accessible and relevant. Doing ordinariness appears to involve translational, epistemic and biographic dimensions that resonate with the interactional but also broader contexts in which reporting takes place.
In this chapter, we attempt, inspired by Sacks’ (1984) discussion of “doing being ordinary”, to explore and expound the means and purposes celebrities do “being ordinary” on social media and the related notions of narrative in digital communication and narrative identity. These notions are conceptualized with reference to the Chinese business mogul Jack Ma’s means of doing ordinary things vs. doing things ordinarily on Sina Weibo through the social media’s affordance of multimodal resources. What emerges in the course of data analysis is our proposed sense of doing being ordinary, i.e., the observation of the order of things. Our analysis shows that storytelling serves as an important pragmatic strategy in Jack Ma’s doing “being ordinary” on Weibo and that most of Ma’s posts turn out to be “extraordinarily carefully regulated sorts of things” (Sacks 1984: 428), which aim to project, present and/or preserve Jack Ma’s various positive narrative identities.
This chapter studies how ‘ordinariness’ and mostly ‘ordinary’ are being constructed in on-line commenting in Hebrew and Finnish. Starting with the premise that “being ordinary” is dynamically and co-operatively constructed, we adopt the notion of “positioning” to account for the ways ordinary commenters position third parties as ordinary and thus “do being ordinary” and the accountability related to it. The study relies on corpus-based methods: using corpora of commenting in each language, the equivalents of ‘ordinary’, i.e. tavallinen (Finnish), ragil and pashut (Hebrew), are identified and the attitudinal meanings implied by their collocations are examined. The findings indicate that both Hebrew and Finnish commenters position ordinary people in the contexts of politics and politicians, social injustice, social norms, moral and ethics. Culture-specific contexts include military service and orthodox/secular conflicts in Hebrew, self- and other- positioning as having positive qualities coupled with the feeling of being excluded from society in Finnish.
This chapter deals with the evolution of ordinariness in French media by highlighting two phenomena: the emergence of a new form of ordinary discourse defined as ‘ordinary political discourse’, ordinary but also militant and/or expert, and the questioning of this ordinariness, sometimes denounced as imposture. The study falls within the scope of the semio-pragmatics of media discourse, combining the methods of discourse analysis with research questions in media studies. The data are composed of emblematic case studies: TV programs (two French political talk-shows where guests are confronted with ‘ordinary people’) and a Facebook video. The chapter focuses on the way participants position themselves as ordinary (conversational style, self-presentation, visual and non-verbal markers, emotional discourse, illocutionary values, etc.). It also analyzes how these ‘ordinary participants’ are defined by the media and the audience and it shows that the ordinariness of these participants can be questioned by media and audiences, trigger public debates and institutional calls to order.
Building on previous studies of casual conversations by older Japanese women in which quotidian reframing was used as a strategy to present serious and extraordinary situations from the perspective of the quotidian (e.g. Matsumoto 2011), this chapter examines how reframing to the quotidian, i.e. “doing being quotidian,” participates in the construction of ordinariness in verbal interactions in mass media and social networks in the U.S. and Japan. Through analyses of the interaction of a veteran host of a Japanese talk show with a guest, two former U.S. Presidents’ presentations of themselves at public events, and postings on a Japanese political party’s Twitter account, we consider psychological and social conditions and effects of quotidian reframing in media.
This paper investigates one specific aspect of impression management (self-presentation as an ordinary person) of the candidates during the 2016 Austrian presidential campaign on Twitter and asks whether the candidates’ campaigns followed the innovation or the normalization hypothesis. By applying Goffman’s concepts of “giving” vs. “giving off” information to the affordances of political communication on Twitter, a communicated ordinariness strategy is distinguished from a staged ordinariness strategy. Different forms of these two strategies are identified in the candidates’ tweets by investigating the pictorial and verbal elements of their tweets. Results show that both strategies are employed rather infrequently in all but one of the candidates’ tweets. Only one of the candidates used a staged ordinariness strategy during one phase of the campaign. These results show that most candidates employed communication strategies which conform to the normalization hypothesis rather than to the innovation hypothesis. Furthermore, the results suggest that following a consistent communication strategy throughout an entire campaign might ultimately lead to electoral success.
In line with theories of charismatic leadership (Weber 1947, Shamir et al. 1994), and drawing on Goffman’s approach (1959) regarding impression management as well as on Sacks’ concept (1984) of (extra)ordinariness as a work done through discourse, this study defines and analyzes a discursive practice employed by Israeli PM Netanyahu in his public talks, namely the construction of an image that on the one hand, all citizens can identify and empathize with, and on the other, presents him as so unique as to be irreplaceable. The examples demonstrate the stylistic, discursive and thematic aspects of Netanyahu’s public discourse on the background of culture-specific norms and expectations.
The analysis identifies two types of ordinariness that Netanyahu communicates to the audience: The positive ordinariness that Weizman and Fetzer (2018) associate with the fulfillment of civic duties, and being “all-Israeli” in the sense of being an average, down-to-earth member of Israeli society.
Prime Minister’s Questions is the central British parliamentary institution. Every week Members of Parliament have the opportunity to pose questions to the Prime Minister, frequently utilising quotations from various sources, e.g. allies from the quoter’s political party, political opponents, experts, or ordinary people. The focus of this contribution is on the strategic use of quotations from ordinary people in the interchanges between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The data comprise 240 question-response sequences. In the sequences analysed, quotations make up 9% of the total word count for Cameron-Miliband and 10% for Cameron-Corbyn: 2% of the quotations are sourced by ordinary people in the Cameron-Miliband data, and 31% in the Cameron-Corbyn data. Corbyn’s systematic use of quotations from ordinary people was novel, foregrounding their political issues and assigning them the status of an object of discourse in the media thus making the government accountable to them.
The chapter examines readers’ comments on a Facebook post in which the Israeli politician Yair Lapid positions himself as an ordinary person. Based on Sacks (1984), it is argued that such positioning is characterized by themes, perspectives, and communicative patterns typical of ordinary people, rather than political-public authorities.
An examination of 141 relevant readers’ comments shows that, in Bakhtin’s terms, there are three main readings of such ordinary voice: A single-voiced reading, which views the ordinary voice as legitimate, authentic, and independent; a double-voiced reading, which views the ordinary voice as authentic and legitimate, but as partial; and a polyphonic reading, which views the ordinary voice as fictitious, illegitimate, and designated to promote a political agenda. The paper discusses the communicative patterns of each category in comparison to those of the original post, and examines the effect of these patterns on the positioning of both Lapid and his readers.
Radio call-in shows, mainly political ones, are prevalent in discursive research, dating back to Hutchby’s influential work. This chapter discusses the leading United States economic self-help radio call-in show, “The Dave Ramsey show” and how ordinariness is used in it. The host, Dave Ramsey, advises callers, and the audience, regarding their economic behavior. This counseling creates a paradox: an expert-millionaire advises ordinary people and fans regarding their economic struggles. The host presents himself as ordinary to solve this paradox. Ramsey constructs his ordinariness using vernacular language, referring to a shared ‘common-sense,’ using mundane stories and relating to the callers as a family. Then, the chapter discusses two interactions with “non-ordinary” callers, a poor and a rich caller, to show the uses of the ordinariness practices in them. The conclusion connects the ordinariness of the host to his neoconservative ideology, to point to the notion of ordinary success he tries to deliver.
Science journalism entails an orientation to the interests and understandings of ordinary audiences. The key challenge for journalists is to present the research reported as newsworthy and translate complex findings to understandable terms. This study examines interviews with scientific experts conducted in the Israeli current affairs program London et. Kirschenbaum, focusing on discursive strategies used by presenters to align with the interests and knowledge of their audiences. The doing of “being ordinary” emerges as a key resource for allocating the translation of scientific knowledge between expert guests and the presenters themselves. In doing so, they are shown to shift between knowers or ignorants of the topic reported in a way that reflects their public personae and their task of making science accessible and relevant. Doing ordinariness appears to involve translational, epistemic and biographic dimensions that resonate with the interactional but also broader contexts in which reporting takes place.
In this chapter, we attempt, inspired by Sacks’ (1984) discussion of “doing being ordinary”, to explore and expound the means and purposes celebrities do “being ordinary” on social media and the related notions of narrative in digital communication and narrative identity. These notions are conceptualized with reference to the Chinese business mogul Jack Ma’s means of doing ordinary things vs. doing things ordinarily on Sina Weibo through the social media’s affordance of multimodal resources. What emerges in the course of data analysis is our proposed sense of doing being ordinary, i.e., the observation of the order of things. Our analysis shows that storytelling serves as an important pragmatic strategy in Jack Ma’s doing “being ordinary” on Weibo and that most of Ma’s posts turn out to be “extraordinarily carefully regulated sorts of things” (Sacks 1984: 428), which aim to project, present and/or preserve Jack Ma’s various positive narrative identities.
This chapter studies how ‘ordinariness’ and mostly ‘ordinary’ are being constructed in on-line commenting in Hebrew and Finnish. Starting with the premise that “being ordinary” is dynamically and co-operatively constructed, we adopt the notion of “positioning” to account for the ways ordinary commenters position third parties as ordinary and thus “do being ordinary” and the accountability related to it. The study relies on corpus-based methods: using corpora of commenting in each language, the equivalents of ‘ordinary’, i.e. tavallinen (Finnish), ragil and pashut (Hebrew), are identified and the attitudinal meanings implied by their collocations are examined. The findings indicate that both Hebrew and Finnish commenters position ordinary people in the contexts of politics and politicians, social injustice, social norms, moral and ethics. Culture-specific contexts include military service and orthodox/secular conflicts in Hebrew, self- and other- positioning as having positive qualities coupled with the feeling of being excluded from society in Finnish.
This chapter deals with the evolution of ordinariness in French media by highlighting two phenomena: the emergence of a new form of ordinary discourse defined as ‘ordinary political discourse’, ordinary but also militant and/or expert, and the questioning of this ordinariness, sometimes denounced as imposture. The study falls within the scope of the semio-pragmatics of media discourse, combining the methods of discourse analysis with research questions in media studies. The data are composed of emblematic case studies: TV programs (two French political talk-shows where guests are confronted with ‘ordinary people’) and a Facebook video. The chapter focuses on the way participants position themselves as ordinary (conversational style, self-presentation, visual and non-verbal markers, emotional discourse, illocutionary values, etc.). It also analyzes how these ‘ordinary participants’ are defined by the media and the audience and it shows that the ordinariness of these participants can be questioned by media and audiences, trigger public debates and institutional calls to order.
Building on previous studies of casual conversations by older Japanese women in which quotidian reframing was used as a strategy to present serious and extraordinary situations from the perspective of the quotidian (e.g. Matsumoto 2011), this chapter examines how reframing to the quotidian, i.e. “doing being quotidian,” participates in the construction of ordinariness in verbal interactions in mass media and social networks in the U.S. and Japan. Through analyses of the interaction of a veteran host of a Japanese talk show with a guest, two former U.S. Presidents’ presentations of themselves at public events, and postings on a Japanese political party’s Twitter account, we consider psychological and social conditions and effects of quotidian reframing in media.