Dubai - störst, högst och lyxigast? -En multimodal kritisk diskursanalys av Dubais officiella turismkonto på Instagram

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to gain a greater understanding of how companies use the social media platform Instagram to represent and promote a place. More precisely, it is of interest to analyze the media production of luxury tourism and how communication tools are applied in order to affect the consumers’ perceptions and increase tourism. In this study we examine the city Dubai’s official tourism account Visit Dubai on Instagram. We focus our research on how the social actors are represented in both image and text, but also the environments in which they are located. In order to investigate how the marketing company Visit Dubai uses semiotic tools to portray its city as a luxury city, we apply a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA). The theoretical framework is therefore based on research regarding social semiotics and place branding. To achieve the aim of the study, the following questions are formulated: In what ways are social actors and the environments in which they are visually represented? In what ways are social actors and the environments they are placed represented linguistically? In what ways are visual and linguistic resources combined to create performances of Dubai as a tourist destination in the material? What discourses are articulated in Visit Dubai´s material and which relevant discourses are excluded? The result of the analysis shows that all 18 images examined can be related to either luxury, power or status. It is clear that Visit Dubai via their Instagram account, encourages and reinforces the need to achieve high social status, financial status and also to promote luxury consumption.