Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, Blockchain, and the Internet of Things, have become salient topics across different news media outlets around the globe. This potentially shapes how broader media audiences perceive these technologies and relevant actors. While private companies that drive technology developments operate on a global scale and transcend national borders, they are often still associated with specific geopolitical regions or nation-states (e.g. Alibaba and China or Facebook and the USA). Countries also actively pursue extensive digitalisation policies to posit themselves as leading digital economies (e.g. Estonia). The study explores who is portrayed as rising “start-up countries”, “data superpowers” and if there is indeed media talk about a new arms race between leading tech- and data economies. The empirical analysis focuses on the framing of key actors in the global “tech” news media discourse and provides an examination of the network of actors over time.
The guiding research questions are: How are (geo-)political powers such as China, Russia, the USA, Europe, and developing areas in the global south, often represented via public and private organisations, portrayed in the media discourse on datafication and digital transformation? What risks, responsibilities, challenges and chances are communicated? Who is at the centre of blame-games when data accidents, data invasions, data thefts and other scandals happen? When are key players perceived as innovators and inspirations - and when are they threats? What are the differences in framing between news media outlets?
The empirical investigation is firmly rooted in an innovative digital methods-inspired research design. It combines semi-automated data collection, natural language processing (topic modeling and named entity recognition) with manual framing- and network analyses of news media content. The sample includes 20 international mainstream news outlets as well as technology-focused special interest media from across the world that publish in English (e.g. China Daily, South China Post, New York Times, BBC, Wired, Times of India and more). The text corpus derived from these outlets includes all relevant articles that cover key technologies in the digital transformation: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, Blockchain, and Internet of Things. The time frame spans from 1998 to 2019, which allows for a historical analysis of the global technology discourse and the framing of key players that represent (geo-)political spheres and countries, i.e. both private and public organisations that shape and drive these technologies and their adoption.
The discussion includes a critical reflection on the role of digital ethics, data ownership, privacy, accountability, responsibility and inclusion in the global tech discourse. The novelty of the study lies in providing an empirically grounded overview of the (historical) tech discourse and key actors on a global scale by applying a combination of computerised and manual framing- and network analyses of a large volume of news media content.
Keywords: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, Media Framing, Topic Modeling, Digital Methods