Frame Building the "Social Digitization" in the German Press

Pablo Porten-Cheé ¹

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Abstract

In recent years, digital technologies have developed rapidly and have consequently been adopted for wider social purposes. It follows that digitization has economic and political consequences to the extent that it generates new forms of production, distribution and regulation. This study shows how print media present the interface between digital technologies and society. Arguing with a theoretical framework consisting of political parallelism at the media system level, editorial lines at the media outlet level and diverging values and sociological structures at the journalistic level, systematic differences in the frame building of digitization between outlets are assumed. The findings of a content analysis of print media from 2003 and 2008 indicate that social digitization framing was partially ideologically motivated. A content analysis of German print media shows that left-leaning press reports social digitization critically by highlighting the negative consequences of political actions. Conversely, right-leaning press portrays social digitization more often and in a more positive light by slightly emphasizing its economic characteristics.

Keywords

digitization frame building agenda building political parallelism print media content analysis

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.