My Friend is a WWI Soldier: A Semiopragmatic Approach to Docufictions on Social Networks

At the beginning of the twentieth-first century, notable for the triumph of both fiction and a taste for reality (Veyrat-Masson 2008), interactive documentary-dramas appeared on social networks. These Internet-based audiovisual productions invite semiotics to reconsider its tools in order to grasp their complex, hybrid nature, above and beyond the binary opposition of reality and fiction. After considering the semiotic systems which characterize social networks and condition enunciation (Van Dijck, 2013), we proceed to examine the Léon Vivien, Louis Castel and Little Suzon documentary-dramas from a semio-pragmatic point of view. We will examine the relationship between reality, fiction and realism on the basis of the semiopragmatic models developed by Hanot (2002) and Jost (2001) in order to analyse these audiovisual productions on four levels: profilmic, plastic, iconic and diegetic. By adapting these models to Internet, we will be able to identify the authenticating and fictional strategies employed in such online productions to make the archive images waver between the status of index and icon.