This paper explores how a shared understanding of the potential uses of new, abstract technologies is created in journalism. We analyse Finnish journalistic texts from 2010–2020, representing both general and specialized journalism, where two relatively new technological phenomena, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), are introduced to the readers, conceptualized, and discussed.
We are interested in the discourses through which these technologies have been defined, and how the potential or imaginary applications of these technologies have been explained and evaluated. This is important because technologies do not enter the lives of people as concrete devices or programs, but initially as conceptual, imaginary, and affective entities.
The expectations placed on new technologies are most visible in journalism. While positive framing may generate unrealistic expectations, such as technology hypes, negative framing may constrain or stop the adoption of a technology or delay the acceptance of its applications.
Drawing on the classic Technology Acceptance Model (TAM, see Venkatesh, Davis, & Morris, 2007; Venkatesh & Bala, 2008), we discuss how journalism frames and reframes (see e.g. Reese, 2003) the salient attributes of these technologies especially in terms of their perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Furthermore, we are interested in speculative meaning-making since we regard meanings as reflections of the technological imaginary (see Lister et al., 2009, 67). These imaginaries reveal something about what kinds of desires for a better society and anxieties for worse are associated with the blockchain and AI technologies.
References
Lister, M., J. Dovey, S. Giddings, I. Grant & K. Kelly (2009). New Media: A Critical Introduction (2e Edition). New York: Routledge.
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Reese, S. (2003). Prologue—framing Public Life: A Bridging Model for Media Research. In Framing Public Life. Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, 7–31. New York: Routledge.
Venkatesh, V. & H. Bala (2008). Technology Acceptance Model 3 and a Research Agenda on Interventions, Decision Sciences, 39 (2): 273–315, doi:10.1111/j.1540-5915.2008.00192.x
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