Televangelists’ Self-presentation on Their Websites and Social Media Platforms

After examining televangelists’ self-presentation on YouTube in Chapter 4, in this chapter, I will examine the self-presentation of Muslim televangelists on their websites and social media profiles. Using insights from a variety of approaches, including research on website analysis (cf. Djonov and Knox, Norris and Maier (eds) in Interactions, images and text: A reader in multimodality: Trends in Applied Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter, 2014), the Discourse Historical Approach (cf., Reisigl and Wodak, Wodak and Meyer (eds), Methods of critical discourse analysis, Sage, 2009) and the Theory of Visual Grammar (cf. Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), the chapter will first analyse televangelists’ websites, throwing light on three parameters which showed to be significant in relation to televangelists’ self-presentation, namely visual structure and layout, televangelists’ use of images and their biographies. This will be followed by an investigation of televangelists’ self-presentation on social media; the chapter will identify two key patterns common among the three televangelists on their Facebook and Twitter/X pages, namely self-promotion and appealing to a global community of Muslims. The third section of the chapter will turn attention to the role of televangelists’ fans in extending televangelists’ popularity. The chapter will show that Muslim televangelism represented a highly hybrid genre that drew on a variety of linguistic and multimodal devices, embedded online literacy practices, as well as specific rhetorical features (e.g., drawn from the domain of advertisements). In addition, the chapter will demonstrate the ‘participatory’ nature (Jenkins in Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press, New York, 2006) of Muslim televangelism where some users take an active role in the (re-) mediation and co-creation of televangelists’ content. By looking at the self-presentation of Muslim televangelists on their websites and social media, the chapter will strengthen a vein of research that has explored the nexus of faith, language and digital practice (cf. Pihlaja, in Religious talk online: the evangelical discourse of Muslims, Christians, and atheists, Cambridge University Press, 2018; Rosowsky in Linguist Edu 53:100751, 2019).