A model of frame categories for analyzing media discourse of emerging technologies

This paper presents a model of frame categories for analyzing media discourse of emerging technologies, applying it to two original case studies on UK news coverage of Big Data and Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI). The Frame Categories for Emerging Technologies (FCET) model offers four categories (Conceptualization, Newness, User Experience and Evaluation) to allow researchers to identify frames inductively whilst affording easy and effective comparisons between studies. The empirical results demonstrate this, showing the news included frames unique to each technology (such as Vast for Big Data and Human-Like for Gen-AI), as well as shared frames such as Revolutionary and Important. This paper contributes to literature on the media discourse of emerging technologies and offers a methodological contribution to improve the quality and comparability of future studies in this area.