Digital Rhetoric of Pandemic Elections: Toward Multilingual Multimodal Information Design

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has caused most activities to move into the digital ecosystem, thus igniting a plethora of suasive forces in digital infrastructure. This chapter discussed how discursive-material networks constrain information access in Ghana’s 2020 electoral process during a pandemic. Election messages are circulated through campaign rallies, but the 2020 election took on a more digital approach where information is designed and circulated in most social media spaces. We ask how digital infrastructure and linguistic choices prevent multilinguals from accessing campaign information and how can this vulnerability be prevented. Using the concept of affective data technologies, we explore how election candidates and their campaign teams attempted to design messages and use aggregates of data to structure voting desire while excluding electorates who do not have access to digital infrastructure. Our data comes from Facebook and YouTube. Our findings reveal that the linguistic and multimodal choices of campaign information on social media privilege a particular language and mode of delivery. We suggest that what we call Multilingual Multimodal Information Design (MMID) be used in future endeavors. These multimodal designs must center community linguistic diversity to cater to all netizens’ possible rhetorical action of issue-based voting.