Constructing “King Babar”: A Multimodal Analysis of Babar Azam Fans’ Posts on Social Media

Abstract

This research aims to explore the acknowledgement given by fans of the Ex-Captain of the Pakistani Cricket Team, Babar Azam. The digital platform this study will be using is “X”. This study has chosen tweets of multiple accounts by purposive sampling. 6 tweets have been taken from X in the span of 2023 for this purpose. The data is analyzed qualitatively, and the framework employed for this research is Multimodal, proposed by Kress and Leeuwen's (2006) visual grammar, which provides an accurate description of the replicating meaning, interactive meaning, and compositional meaning of picture conversation and is also applicable to the analysis of X discourse. This study discusses how various symbolic elements communicate with one another in order to create an entire discourse with linguistic signs, such as the use of certain adjectives, angles, and colors, and then express additional interpersonal interactive meaning. The importance of this study resides not just in its attention on cricket sensation Babar Azam, but also in its methodological creativity. The study goes beyond the typical analysis of text by including Kress and Leeuwen's (2006) visual grammar paradigm. This enables a more sophisticated comprehension of how fans use visual components such as angles, colors, and emoticons to create and convey an idealized picture of their star. The findings suggest that through the utilization of such linguistic signs, the fans have glamorized the image of Babar Azam. Along with that, the findings also suggest that visual grammar is viable and practical for analyzing multimodal X posts. The backdrop and content of X conversation may be successfully reinforced and clarified, and it is critical to increase viewers' capacity to interpret tweets.