Introduction
Traditional forms of mass media, such as print newspapers and broadcast television, were among the first to adopt digital opportunities afforded by the advent of the internet. The first online newspaper appeared in 1980, the same year the first successful personal computer was developed. By the mid-1990s, most news media had a digital presence, with many offering 24-hour access to content. When smartphones grew in popularity, news media were among the first to optimize their content for mobile and create news-specific apps. From the start, news organizations have had the resources to embrace new media opportunities as they were developed. Yet this ongoing adoption of digital technologies …show more content…
Ideologies are the “basic frameworks for organizing the social cognitions shared by members of social groups, organizations or institutions” (Dijk, 1995, p. 17) that allow us to establish a baseline of group epistemology. Ideologies can “influence the ways social attitudes are expressed in discourse structures” (Dijk, 2001, p. 11) and as such, act as social representations in discourse. However, caution must be used to avoid delving too deeply into the ideological pool, and thus be distracted away from the patterns and structures of the discourse itself (Matheson, 2005). Consideration must also be made for the power structures of mass media, as part of a larger construct of understanding (Matheson, 2005). The power of the media’s mass distribution “transforms selected private perspectives into broad public perspectives” (Gerbner, 1985, p. 15) thus creating associations where none may have existed before. While ideology can demonstrate “socioculturally shared knowledge” (Dijk, 2001, p. 12), the influence of mass media may be responsible, at least in part, for that culturally shared knowledge. For the purposes of this research study, the focus of the analysis will centre on the lexical structures of the articles relating to millennials, though ideological considerations of shared knowledge will be considered alongside the influence of media for …show more content…
In their 2003 article Voices in Discourses: Dialogism, Critical Discourse Analysis and Ethnic Identity (2006), Finnish scholars Pietikainen & Dufva examine a semi-structured interview with a Laplander journalist to “illustrate how identity must be understood as something which is both individual and social in nature” (p. 205). The critical analysis of ethnic identity revealed “an entanglement of (individual) voices intertwined with a variety of (social) discourses” (p. 220) to create an overall personal and professional identity of the