How is technology manipulation framed in media?
Given the growth of India and China as digital economies, we sought to learn how technology manipulation is framed within these new regional contexts as reflected in popular media articles.
1. What are the frames used to describe tech manipulation in the Indian and Chinese contexts?
2. How do these frames support particular discourses around tech manipulation in these national contexts?
1. Build upon current knowledge through inter-disciplinary efforts in discourse analysis,
2. Facilitate community deliberation, and
3. Cross-pollinate ideas to bring awareness and action for technology manipulation regulation.
Data collection
We started off with an open web search, shortlisting of popular media houses in both cultural contexts, and using keywords like - technology, ethics, technology manipulation, dark patterns, and bad design, to build an initial corpus of media articles.
Inclusion and exclusion criteria for articles
As a team, we read through the collected articles while defining descriptors that describe key elements such as the stakeholders involved, policies being discussed, sensitizing concepts (e.g., fraud, dark patterns, privacy breach), etc. being used to describe tech manipulation.
Post this, to focus our search towards getting insights into how conversations around “tech manipulation” take place in the public domain of the Indian and Chinese national contexts, we used the following inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Identifying media frame vocabulary
We drew from framing theory presented in media studies literature to identify media frame classifiers, and conducted top-down thematic analysis.
Codebook creation
In addition to the media frame classifiers for coding, we identified a set of codes to capture relevant metadata and other important elements of the articles collected.
These included design-focused content being discussed in the article (e.g., apps highlighted, features discussed), various stakeholder representations in the articles (e.g., users, regulators, practitioners, companies), the vocabulary used to discuss technology manipulation throughout the article (e.g., dark patterns, fraud, scams), other related in-article vocabulary, and the intended outcome of the published article.
Final analysis of media articles
After coding all the included media articles , we observed that four frames occurred most frequently and represented common forms of mediation among the fourteen general frames presented in the media frame typology.
We decided to focus our analysis on these commonly-occurring frames which included: 1) Policy Prescription and Evaluation, 2) Data Security, 3) Jurisprudence, and 4) Crime.
Complete discussion section and future work for journal submission
