Bürgermeisterkommunikation in Sozialen Medien: Transformationen sprachlich-kommunikativer Rituale

Abstract

The main task of official rituals is to strengthen the sense of community, stability and social cohesion in a community. As a result of the Corona pandemic rituals experienced a digitalization boost, as new contactless communication channels had to be found. In the light of previous research findings, this paper examines such creative forms of linguistic shaping of rituals, focusing on mayoral communication and medial transformations in a qualitative perspective. It can be observed that rituals in social media continue to be designed for a cohesive function and, as performative and expressive acts, symbolically refer to the social order beyond their content. The performance of rituals in social media with the help of multimodal and intertextual, parainteractive and dialogical resources represents an adaptation to the communication habits of citizens. Thus, an approximation to linguistic characteristics typical for social media can be stated, with which the lack of cooperation conditions in comparison to conventional rituals can be partially compensated, but which are also susceptible to communicative disruption in a specific way.