From Television to social media. Persuasive strategies through 'intertextual irony'

Presentation for the Fifteenth International Conference on The Image #ICOTI24 Abstract Irony is a complex discursive tool whose power can serve as both social critique and manipulative concealment. In fact, it is widely exploited in media communication due to its significant persuasive potential. The first postmodernist novelists played a key role in debunking the vacuous and manipulative nature of consumerism and entertainment culture. Their crucial tool has been irony, which unveiled the ideological essence of Western mass cultural products by subverting the conventions of TV narrations. Nevertheless, 1990s writers failed to introduce a new cultural paradigm that could supplant the former. Meanwhile, the television industry has started exploiting irony against itself to deflect criticism related to its own superficiality and manipulation. TV has become unbeatable because it appears self-critical and thus “sincere”. This paper delineates the type of irony that media have employed in order to influence the audience and to overcome its skepticism, focusing specifically on the evolution of this persuasive strategy from the era of TV dominance to the era of social media supremacy. In fact, the process earlier described is currently unfolding in nowadays advertising on social media, through something we can label as ‘intertextual irony’, which is a peculiar kind of irony that breaks traditional textual rules to establish a complicity with the viewers and induce them to align with the behaviours prompted by the advertisements. Using a semiotic perspective, it will show how this mechanism works by analysing a commercial for NooN nail polish line by the Italian rapper Fedez.