Everyday Virtuality: A Multimodal Analysis of Political Participation and Newsworthiness

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital interactions ceased to be “just another form of communication”; indeed, they became the only means of social interaction, mediated and driven by information and communication technologies (ICTs). Consequently, working in a digital context switched from being a phenomenon to be studied to the primary means of socializing and the primary workspace for researchers. This study explores four different methodologies to question how discursive interactions related to power and newsworthiness may be addressed in digital contexts. The multimodal approach was reviewed through the affordances of critical discourse analysis, issue ownership and salience, morphological discourse analysis, and protest event analysis. It starts by theoretically addressing concepts of multimodality and phenomenology by focusing on the implications of both perspectives. It examines publications and interactions in digital contexts in Ecuador from March 2017 to December 2020 within three political phenomena. The results of the analysis of these publications and interactions suggest that when analyzing political participation and newsworthiness, the virtual becomes a subjective space. Moreover, qualitative research is one of the primary ways to combine multimodality with other forms of discourse analysis. This paper concludes that perceptions, practices, and meanings assigned to social online representations can be better analyzed through multimodality, which tackles the intertwined characteristics of virtual discourses.