Between techno-optimism and techno-skepticism: the narratives of digital pioneers on the impact of key digital technologies

The purpose of the paper is to analyze articles from ten leading technology-focused media to distinguish key narratives of technological development. It argues that the media put forward ethical and political agendas. Another aim of the article is to deepen the reflection on the role of media sources in the processes of deep mediatization and the interpretive flexibility of technology. To analyze the media sources, a mixed-methods approach was deployed, comprising text-mining tools (co-occurrence analysis, sentiment analysis) and qualitative analyzes (sociology of knowledge approach to discourse, SKAD). The dataset included articles chosen on the basis of popularity (ie, shares on Twitter). The qualitative analysis was conducted on 100 articles from these sources.