| The rise of aging coincides with a rising wave of digital life.The 49th Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet shows that as of December 2021,the number of elderly netizens aged 60 and above in China reached 119 million,with an Internet penetration rate of 43.2%.Along with the he realistic problem of the impact of the Internet and the aging age,elderly netizens have gradually become an increasingly large group of people.At the same time,the related reports for elderly netizens are also increasing with the continuous development of Internet technology,and the presentation of elderly media images has also changed as a result.Through a content analysis coverage of issues related to "the elderly and the Internet" during ten years from January 1,2012 to December 31,2021,This paper takes People's Daily and China News Service as the representatives of newspaper and online media to explore the differences from a comparative perspective between the two media and the changes in the view of diachronic on constructing the media image of the elderly netizens during the decade.From a general perspective,through the analysis of both character information characteristics and report element characteristics,it can be found that reports on the media image of elderly netizens increase with the advancement of year with obvious geographical and gender discrimination focusing on urbanized elderly netizens and male elderly netizens groups more often.What's more,it centers on the elderly netizens at the age of 60-74 years old.This characterization feature is caused by the structure of character attributes and social status of the current elderly Internet users,which in a sense the media constructs the reality.In terms of the content of the reports,we can see that both media focus on the theme of digital divide among the elderly and use the framework of responsibility to present the situation of social support for the elderly in the difficult process of Internet access and suggestions to solve the problem of the digital divide,thus presenting a positive tendency of the reports in general,showing the good situation of the elderly in the Internet with social support in order to spread positive energy.From a comparative perspective,there are obvious differences between the two media in terms of news style,news framework and citation sources.People's Daily presents the current situation,causes and effects of the difficulty of Internet access for elderly people in the form of features and further puts forward the solutions of the problem.It leads audiences to mine with the value of the underlying implication of information of the deep digital divide of the elderly to find the essential causes and solutions of this phenomenon,so as to achieve the effect of macro-control.It mostly presents the leadership frame through the government's perspective,and presents suggestions on how to better integrate the elderly into the digital society at present with the help of documents or words of government staff,thus calling on all sectors of society to form a good atmosphere of caring for the elderly.China New's Service,on the other hand,is more news-oriented,presenting the real life situation of elderly Internet users in a short and concise form and focusing on the use of the human interest framework from the perspective of the elderly and the relevant interest groups of family,enterprise and social organizations,which presents the current situation of the multifaceted participation of all sectors of society in helping the elderly to cross the digital divide and solve the barriers to Internet use.Specifically,People's Daily tends to present the offline living condition of elderly netizens' online services and the government's support for elderly netizens' Internet access through the leadership framework,while China News Service presents the online living experience of elderly netizens' online consumption and culture and the support created by the whole society with the participation of multiple social actors through the human interest framework,showing the social atmosphere of mutual help and stimulating people's understanding and recognition of elderly online users.From the perspective of diachronic,the two media have increased the proportion of female and rural images in their coverage of the image of elderly netizens since 2017.Meanwhile their cognition toward the Internet have transitted from difficult to simple and their behavior toward the Internet changed from passive to active.Respectively,the rise of active behavior and simple cognition of reaching the Internet shown by China News Service is relatively larger than that of People's Daily.As we can see,People's Daily has never reported on the positive image of young-minded,online trend chasers.Thus,the positive side reporting attitude of China News Service has become more prominent.Moreover,although both focus on the negative theme of the digital divide among the elderly,since 2017 both media outlets have started to increase their coverage of positive themes such as online culture among the elderly,online consumption among the elderly and online socialization among the elderly,except that People's Daily has grown relatively slowly with its coverage of negative themes still dominating.On the other hand,the coverage conveying positive attitude of China News Service has risen more rapidly,which along with the decline in the number of negative topic stories,the proportion of positive topic stories begins to equal and surpass that of negative topic stories.In general,People's Daily and China News Service build elderly netizens medium overall biased towards the negative image such as victims of Internet fraud,laggards lack of Internet skills and rumor spreaders lack of discrimination.But as time goes by,there is a difference in the reporting trend for positive images of the elderly as young-minded,Internet trend chasers and neutral images of enthusiastic WeChat and Internet video participants.Based on the media attributes of portal websites and diversified discourse characteristics,China News Service focuses more on positive image reports and shows the elderly's active participation in online society,which shapes a more diversified "elderly" identity.On the other hand,People's Daily does not report positive images of the elderly,but pays more attention to neutral and negative media images of the elderly netizens,creating an image of the weak who passively accepts the network society.The key difference in the evolution of the media image of the two media lies in the setting of the news frame and the selection of the target of the report.People's Daily shows too many reports of government and society's care for the elderly netizens group,deepening the image of the elderly as the weak who need to be taken care of.China News Service on the other hand,starts to try to focus on the perspective of the elderly in 2017,presenting the online world in their eyes with the help of their discourse,which can increase the right of discourse of the elderly.Therefore,China News Service makes use of the function of media education to lay the foundation for reversing the stereotypical image of the elderly.In a word,in order to perfect the media coverage of elderly netizens in China,news media should make full use of official empowerment to broaden the reporting discourse space,not only to guide the audience to establish positive values from the perspective of the government and the media,but also to build a trinity of school,community and family to present the real situation of elderly netizens with the participation of multiple parties in society,thus enriching the reporting issues.The media should try to focus more on the elderly people and other stakeholders who help the elderly on the basis of positive guidance of public opinion,so as to reverse the image of gullible and weak image and to present a realistic and vivid image of elderly Internet users.To improve the media image of elderly netizens,it is necessary to require joint efforts of the public,government and the media.As a bridge to communicate with the world,media education should be brought into play a role to enhance the status of the elderly solving the problems of "accessibility" of the elderly to new media,"selectivity" of new media applications and "sense of fairness" in the digital world. |
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