Enhancing digital literacy through the understanding of multimodal creativity in social media: A case study of Elon Musk’s social influencer discourse in his Twitter posts

Abstract

Digital literacy is becoming increasingly popular topic in education as online communication continues to evolve. Social media, in particular, have been the main driving force behind the monomodal-to-multimodal evolution, providing vast opportunities for multimodal texts and multimodal creativity production and dissemination. However, advanced searches on several academic databases performed in this study revealed a paucity of literature on multimodal creativity in social media, making it highly difficult for teachers of digital literacy to find references to support their teaching. This study conducts a case study of Elon Musk’s social-influencer discourse in his Twitter posts in an attempt to enhance digital literacy through the understanding of multimodal creativity in social media. A total of 5,266 Musk's tweets dated between 1 Feb 2017 and 31 May 2019 (28 months in total) was collected and analysed before selecting five examples from 248 multimedia tweets for digital creativity multimodal analysis (DCMA). Using Law’s (forthcoming; 2020) Analytical Framework for Creativity in Multimodal Texts (AFCMT) in DCMA, this study is able to identify Musk’s multimodal creativity patterns and strategies.