| With the arrival of big data era,the data keeps accumulating all the time.Big data technology has great potential in applications and development of many fields,such as politics,economics,culture and medical care,and it has risen to an important national strategy of all major countries in the world.At present,most of the researches on "big data" focus on the discussion of the technology itself.There are few studies on combining big data with journalism and communication theory,and few literatures regard it as a product of social construction.Previous literatures have shown that mass media is the main channel for the public to obtain information about science and technologies,so is the information about big data.Through the selection and reorganization of information,the mass media has become a window for people to understand the outside world.This "window",the "framework”of news production adopted by the news media,helps shape the cognitive images in people's minds.As big data becomes one of the most important topics on news reporting,this study selects the news reports themed "big data" in People's Daily and Science and Technology Daily from January 1,2012 to December 31,2018 as the research object.The news reports analysis intends to present the news frameworks and landscape,so as to better understand the media's communication paradigm for big data.Based on social constructionism and framing theory,this paper mainly adopts the method of content analysis to show the status quo of China's mainstream media coverage during selected time periods.This paper selects People's Daily and Science and Technology Daily as the representative of comprehensive media and professional technological media respectively.After analyzing the content of 893 news articles in three aspects:the forms,the specific content and trends of the frames over time,this paper found that the development of big data can be divided into three stages according to the amount of reports:the initial stage,the stage of exploring and the stage of steady development.The number of news reports on big data maintains a steady increase during the seven years.The period from 2014 to 2015 marks a peak time and the volume of reports starts to increase again in 2017 after a slight increase in 2016.The conclusions are as follows.First,as time went on,media reports on big data have also experienced the process from "popularization of scientific knowledge" to the "release of results and promotion of big data applications".Among the news articles,the consequence frame is used more frequently,and big data's development and progress become the most important issue in news reports.They focus on the prospective development of big data technology on application and innovation,from political and economic perspectives.And China's underdeveloped regions,such as Guizhou Province are widely reported,such as the role of big data industries to promote local poverty alleviation.Second,from the perspective of reported subjects,the dominant figures in big data issues include government departments,business groups and experts and scholars.To be more specific,the government is the policymaker of big data development,the business groups and experts and scholars are the "promoters",and the public is mostly the"beneficiary".During this process,the discourse system with government,business groups and experts and scholars is highlighted.The significance of this study is to present and explore the mainstream media's framing strategies in the construction of big data by analyzing the content of news reports.From a theoretical perspective,as a form of scientific communication,big data has important research significance and potential,but few scholars conducted researches on it from the perspective of framing theory and social constructionism.I hope this article can provide some foundation and help for the related research on emerging technologies in the future,and look forward to the further breakthroughs of communication studies in the future. |
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