Check in or opt out: Public response to location-based services, 2009 – 2011 Last year, when Facebook decided to launch Facebook Place, media devote their coverage to discuss the issues with the Location-based services (LBS). Foursquare, one of various LBS apps, has been introduced in the terms like “business model of 2011” or “business frontier”. LBS is not a new term, or at least it could be traced back to many old-fashion aspects of life, but social networking, Internet and mobile devices together make it special—even Foursquare has its Foursquare Day on April 16 in many states in America. Based on the previous researches studying the media representation of the technology diffuse, this study examines some world major newspapers, magazines and blogs to provide themes of the public responses to Foursquare. Born with the concern of surveillance and privacy issues, it is interesting to explore the media discourse on these conflicts. During Foursquare two-year history, other apps and sites, for instance Please Rob Me, were created to increase the awareness of using Foursquare especially related to privacy issues. With the potential risks to the users’ privacy on LBS, the government administration and experts were all starting working to increase the legislation of Internet privacy. The LBS service providers have been working and updating on their private policy. The providers say that the users have all the right to opt out anything and they can choose what information they want to share with those whom they select. The aim of this analysis is to identify the dominate theme in the news coverage of Foursquare by the world newspapers, magazines and weblogs from March 2009 to March 2011. It extends the researches on the public responses to a new technology and how it is socially constructed through various mainstream media; and it also provides a comparison between the media discourse of other social media and LBS for the future study. "Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral." The first decade of the 21st century is the period in which mobile technology has been leading the way to new computing applications, which is almost the same as the first decade 30 years ago. In the 1980s, personal computer revolution was a successful in America with various factors including advertising and social exchange within groups, making the personal computer “a standard part of the typical American household”(Cogan,2005). For example, seen as the most influential computer during that time, in the year of 1984, Apple advertised Macintosh with the introduction of the user graphic interface and mouse (Cogan, 2005) and also with the implication of that their computer could bring a different world which was not like 1984 articulated by George Orwell. Not only Apple, other companies, such as Xerox, Commodore, Digital Equipment Company and IBM were sharing the market in the computer industry. It was also estimated a huge increase of new Americans getting home computers in the early days of the 1980s (Davis, 1983, p. 1). But, why were there such huge groups of consumers and increases in the computer industry? Scholars (Kumar, 2001; Deluca & Peeples, 2002, Cogan, 2005; also see Katz & Dayan, 1994) turn to examine the media content and public perception towards the introduction of personal computers; introduction of personal computer has been framed as inevitable, necessary and unavoidable (Cogan, 2005). When it comes to other theorists of new technologies, a school of researchers (Innis, 1951; Mumfold, 1963; Postman, 1985) argue that the new technologies bring substantial changes to the social, political and economic structures. Marvin (1988) suggests that the changes are a complicated process involving the negotiations between people and forms of mass media and new technologies. She notes that “the introduction of new media is a special historical occasion when patterns anchored in older media that have provided the stable currency of social exchange are reexamined, challenged and defended.”(p. 4) As the media discourse of personal computers attracts those scholars, Internet has become another important area where its diffusion and use have been studied. Rossler’s (2001) study finds that the German magazine, between January 1995 and June 1998, covered Internet in the same overwhelmingly positive way as personal computer was portrayed in America. The research shows that the German magazines approach the multimedia been perceived as a “media revolution” with useful outcomes for communication in the society and also shows the magazine coverage favors the economically optimistic pattern— Internet been credited as a factor of economic revolution leading to “economic growth, international competitiveness and the creation of new jobs.” (Rossler, 2001) But other scholars (Wellman, 1999; Cornish, 2008) find some negative pattern in studies of the Internet. Wellman (1999) focuses on the notion of community created and used with the computer mediated communication—the Internet actually separates its users from real social relationship. Cornish’s (2008) study concerns that when Internet approaches to a wider range of users, some vague worries become “crystallized” with many issues such as hackers, privacy, pornography and information overload. In addition to personal computer and Internet, a body of previous studies on the media discourse and public responses to the diffusion of technologies reveals different themes. Arceneaux (2005) examines the responses to mobile phones in America in 1981 to 2001, and the findings suggest that the diffusion of mobile phones encourages tolerance, such as people see speaking in public with a handheld device as normal behaviors. Therefore, the violation of established etiquette and social protocol is no longer been perceived as negative. However, other technologies challenging the established social protocols are studied as examples which having the reversed pattern of media representation of technology diffusion, such as telegraph, early radio and other electronic devices (Blondheim, 1994; Czitrom, 1982; Marvin 1988 and Covert, 1994). Arceneaux and Schmitz Weiss (2010) argue that Twitter and telegraph disturb the established concepts of communication, particularly the concepts of space and time and the differences between public and private sphere. All the aforementioned arguments around the media representation of technology diffuse are informed by Melvin Kranzberg’s note–technology is not good, bad or neutral. His notion can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, the nature of the technology (or a specific technology or application software) and the way of its diffusion and use can be employed in different ways. For instance, in the recent years, social media have been constantly mentioned as a critical role in revolutions in different countries and regions. Morozov (2011) in his book The Net Delusion points out that in the process of democratization, Internet have been used as weapons to expedite the regime change such as in Iran but also been used to strengthen the authoritarian control in countries like China and Russia. Secondly, how people perceive the good or evil side of technology also depend on the way they are informed by their information sources, the media framing, which is also the theoretical background of my analysis. Framing theory is often used to understand communication and the behaviors in many fields (e.g. Goffman, 1974; Gamson & Modigliani, 1987; Pan and Kosicki, 1993; Tuchman, 1978, Gitlin, 1980). Goffman claims that the frame, as the “schemata of interpretation”, enables people “to locate, perceive, identify and label.” (Goffman, 1974, p.21) Tuchman brings the concept of story frame into the operation of news, which she says to report news is usually more like to tell a story rather than the truth of what has actually happened. In regards to the specific news channel, Marvin (1988) argues that newspapers functioned as “arenas for negotiating issues critical to the conduct of social order” (p.8), assuming the shifts of written discourse of a technology shows the shifts in the public perception and discourse including “who is inside and who is outside, who may speak and who may not and who has authority and may be believed” (p.4). Because individuals can not experience the whole world ourselves, Gitlin (1980) suggests that people are dependent on the mass media which creates different frames or “patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol handlers routinely organize discourse whether verbal or visual.”(p.7) "I am so totally, digitally close to you." New communication technologies give people platforms for various uses (Castells et al., 2007) “on the basis of independent channels of autonomous communication from person to person.” The networks among people can be easily established by the mobile telephony, which has been increasing dramatically worldwide. For example, in the Middle East, the penetration of mobile-phone was 16.59 percent in 2002 with a yearly increase of 30 percent (Ford, 2003). The mobile telephony, because of its wide availability of individually controlled communication, makes it possible for people not to rely solely on mass media but to form a new space, either private or public. So it is necessary to examine the news representation of the use of mobile devices’ personal activities in public space. The development of mobile telephony, as argued earlier, increases the use of technology for surveillance such as police use, transportation, news reporting, entertainment, which also raises the privacy issue at the same time. As discussed in the beginning, the new computing apps on mobile devices allow people to access their emails, e-commerce or e-business, which Nickerson et al. suggest that now those names could be changed into m-commerce, m-business and m-dating (Nickerson et al., 2007). They also argue that the new apps offer anytime computer and a newer anywhere computing, which is location-based. What should be notified is that scholars point out the location-based information is not new with the mobile devices. Espinoza et al. (2001) point out that the position-specific information exists long before. The location-/position-specific information can be exchanged in one-to-one communication such as notes and graffiti, or sometimes it can inform its local mass audience by posters with events or traffic signal with navigation. However, current LBS allow the probability for two-way or multi-way communication and interactivity. Steiniger et al. describe the model as the users inform the providers their context, needs and position; and the provider of location services deliver the corresponding information to the users. The increasing number of mobile phones and other devices makes such model possible for people not only to gather geographic information such as looking for a restaurant on the maps but also allow them to show their presence of that place and generate information, where the interaction can take place among the users. Virrantaus et al. (2001) define LBS as “information services accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the location of the mobile device.” International OpenGeospatial Consortium (2005) provides another definition of LBS as “a wireless-IP service that uses geographic information to serve a mobile user, any application service that exploits the position of a mobile terminal.” To be able to use LBS, there are several components: mobile devices, communication network or positioning component (Global Positioning System), service and app provider and content and data provider. The definitions and components emphasize the location of the users through network service, which draws attention to the concern of privacy in the public places and during the data exchange. Barkhuus’ (2006) study on privacy in LBS, using two cases, shows that users have initially concerns on the privacy issues involved with LBS. More interestingly the study also shows that after the actual use of LBS, privacy becomes a less concern than the initial stage. Given a lack of study on the public response to LBS, this study can extend the discussion on LBS and privacy issue by analyzing the media content on Foursquare and privacy. It also re-explores the previous studies on the public response towards the diffusion of technology, and examines their approaches and findings to see whether they are transferable to the media discourse on LBS. Method The study proceeded from an analysis of the frames and tones used by a wide range of world major publications. At this stage, the study is concerned with media content on Foursquare and privacy by world newspapers, magazines and weblogs from March 12, 2009 to March 12, 2011 (both days included), the period after Foursquare has been created for two years. The decision to examine the world newspaper is driven by the nature of the issue. Prior researches (Nelkin, 1991) suggest that when it comes to complex issues such as wars (Stromback, 2005), printed channels such as newspapers provide more in-depth information than other media. Another motivation is that because the newspapers and magazines have still a large audience, they are also considered to “uphold an important democratic and informative role for opinion information” (Sandberg, 2007). The decision to use weblogs in this analysis was followed by Arceneaux and Schmitz Weiss’ study on Twitter (2010). To explore the public responses to Foursquare, this study combines the methods used in the previous researches on Twitter and Internet use (Arceneaux & Schmitz Weiss, 2010; Rossler, 2001). Using the grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), the analysis process borrowed the themes and subtopics from those studies. The sample content was coded (open-coding format, also see Arceneaux & Schmitz and Weiss, 2010) into different categories and the corresponding notes were taken during the process. For this study, I drew 20% of all the articles included both of Foursquare and privacy during the date (see Table 1). Repeated stories are treated as one story and finally 251 news articles were coded. All the news stories were collected online from Lexisnexis academic database. All the population and sample content are shown in Table 1, and it is obvious that the coverage on Foursquare increased in the second year. Same as the increase of coverage on Twitter, weblog has the highest increase from my population content, which increased from 62 to 642 and followed by newspapers from 97 to 354. Table 1. “Foursquare and privacy” content by media type and year (March 2009 to March 2011)
Media type and year
Population of content
Sample
Newspapers
March 2009—March 2010
97
19
March 2010—March 2011
354
71
Magazines
March 2009—March 2010
9
4
March 2010—March 2011
83
17
Weblogs
March 2009—March 2010
62
12
March 2010—March 2011
642
128
Findings Consistent with the previous on Twitter, among the sample content, the most prominent theme discovered was the Explanation theme. As a new site, app and company, the news coverage on Foursquare or even the mention of Foursquare explained what Foursquare is and its use. Interestingly, the news stories not only explain Foursquare, but they use Foursquare as an explanation to other service. Because the analysis aims to find coverage on both Foursquare and privacy, I decided to use two dichotomies in deciding the themes. The overwhelming majority of news coverage uses the Positive theme in the articles. Within in Positive themes, several subcategories were created: economical optimistic view; social connectedness and users’ opt-out. Only a few stories have a strong Negative theme towards Foursquare in regards to privacy, but the findings have explored some negative or skeptic subthemes such as the privacy of others, information overload and user skills. Explanation Theme News articles especially data retrieved from 2009 to 2010 presented the explanation of Foursquare whenever the name of the app or the company appears. At the earlier stage, the explanation was on Foursquare company itself and its founders, where the news articles provided a detailed history of the creator and the company. For instance the first news article in my sample content was by the Financial Times on March 25, 2009, provided a very detail of the history of the company: Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 but did nothing with the service, and its founders left in 2007, disappointed at the lack of attention their product had received. Jaiku, bought later that year, also failed to make the grade at Google. It was freed by Google in January as open-source software for others to develop if they wished, while Dodgeball was finally closed down this month. Within days, its founders had launched a new product called Foursquare, restarting four years later their idea of a location-based Twitter-type service. Another popular theme under explanation is that the news articles try to explain the features of the app, and most of them are associated with the words such as “check in” and location: Just as online services like Twitter and Facebook let people update their friends on what they are doing, a new service called Foursquare (http://foursquare.com) allows users to tell their friends where they are. Foursquare members ''check in'' by cell phone at locations around the city, from bars, restaurants and coffee shops to galleries, grocery stores and gyms. By sending up a flare marking wherever they are, users can alert their friends to come join them. It is interesting to note that, at the early stage, the introduction to Foursquare usually appear as one of the well-known social media such as Twitter and Facebook, but another very important finding is that gradually the journalists and bloggers use Foursquare to explain the new features or activities launched by Facebook or a completely new service: Now Facebook has its own offering, Facebook Places, expect more brands to look into location-based marketing using old kids on the block such as Foursquare but also newbies popping up now that Facebook has opted in. Positive Themes Economic optimistic view towards Foursquare and other LBS are the most dominate subtheme founded in the positive themes. The economic optimistic view consider the privacy a minor or secondary issue when it comes to the discussion about a new start-up or well-established social media/company goes to invest money in LBS. The journalists and bloggers concern the possibility to succeed in the market or the gaining of new users more than the privacy. Foursquare's growth shows no sign of slowing with the first million users taking 12 months to acquire and the second million only three. So how is it going to make money? Famously, Twitter only launched its own commercial model - embeddable tweet-adverts - a few weeks ago, some four years after its creation. Foursquare, with several partnership deals already in place and a $20m cash injection from the likes of Facebook board member and Twitter investor Marc Andreessen, appears quicker off the blocks. Another subtheme uncovered is the social connectedness, in which the articles would address how importantly it is to connected with friends, families and colleagues; some articles mention the privacy concerns, but the journalists and bloggers shift the privacy issue very easily into the fun and coolness of the app, such as the mayorship in Foursquare. For example: Social networks are great for staying connected to family and friends, but you must be as careful as you would be on a phone call with a friend knowing strangers are listening too. Foursquare's not a tool for better and more polite stalking - at least not directly. Instead, it's a social city guide and online game. The last but not least important finding from the Positive theme is the users’ opt-out theme, where the news articles use various sources such as the interview with people working in the privacy lab at Foursquare, or direct quotes from Foursquare’s privacy policy or so-called technologists to explain the improvement of privacy settings on this app. When talking about the improvement, they are likely to provide the updating policies, which makes the process is ongoing and they would not stop updating: On Aug. 17, Foursquare updated its privacy policy and policy 101 page, both can be viewed at the bottom of Foursquare's website. They are marked "new." Kalamazoo users Sarah Lee and Enrique Martinez suggested using Foursquare like any other social-networking vehicle -- use caution about the information you put out there and consider using the "off the grid" option. When talking about the “off the grid” option, which is the focus of the opt-out theme, the journalists use the aforementioned sources to reassure the readers that the users can totally opt out and they can decide what privacy setting they want—share with all people, friends or nobody. Because typically in the same articles, the journalists would mention Foursquare does not track users, so the use of such an opt-out theme may function as reassurance to the users: Sharing: You have the option of keeping your check-ins private ("off the grid") or sharing them via Twitter and Facebook. If you want to share them, link to them in your settings. News articles also use quotes to show how to deal with young kids using Foursquare and how easily to “opt-out” when talking about the privacy issues in general in all social networking sites: “If you know at least know the key words, know what Foursquare is, know what Gowalla is, Facebook and Twitter, and know what they do, and maybe sit down with your kids and go through the privacy settings, to make sure they're protected, I think that is a great step in the right direction.” However, this subtheme is the most “attacked” and criticized aspect of privacy in Fousquare by other journalists and bloggers. Negative Themes Overall, the negative themes towards Foursquare and privacy are not obvious in my sample content. The most dominate negative theme is the concern of others’ privacy: mostly, friends and families. The articles explain how “check in” works and it would turn very skeptical about whether the friends you tag in the “check in” care about their privacy; and some news articles concern about the cybercriminals, who might stalk people to their regular check-ins; and issues also revolves around the check-ins of the parents—if the parents check in at some other places than home (or even home is a very “dangerous” check-in) it means your kids would be left alone at home. The finding also shows that bloggers have more concerns about those issues other than the newspapers and magazines. For example: But recent geolocation technology such as Foursquare and Facebook's Places feature, which allow users to "check in" to an exact location on a map and see who else is there, are ratcheting up concerns that more abuse will occur, putting young people at risk Another negative theme towards privacy and Foursquare is the discussion of the users’ online skills, which serves as a response to the “opt-out” theme, and most of the criticism comes from bloggers as well. By talking about the users’ online skills, the bloggers point to the default setting of Foursquare or other social networking sites such as Facebook—your checkins and your profiles are open to public if you do not opt out or change the settings. The bloggers blame the providers because they notice that not everyone is technology savvy and there may be many under-aged teens or young kids using such app. Discussion and Limitation By studying the news coverage on Foursquare and privacy, this analysis finds that the most dominate theme is positive theme, which means more people would check in on those LBS. The economic optimistic view of Foursquare is the most popular subtheme used by journalists and bloggers, which also means the diffusion of Foursquare would still be positive by the media coverage. News articles echo the previous researches on the introduction of personal computers and Twitter, where during that period of time the news talked about the market, the companies and their popularity among users. The preference on the economic optimistic theme could help promote the diffusion of the new app and the company. The economic optimist view is not only towards Foursquare but the similar services, and some articles clearly state that the LBS will lead the Internet business and Foursquare serves as a model of successful business. The emphasis on the market or the economic prosperity of LBS may direct people’s concern to different direction other than privacy. Another area, which the media have been very positive too, can promote the diffusion is the social connectedness/coolness of using LBS. This also recalls Barkhuus’ findings that the actual use of LBS can eliminate some of the concerns on privacy. The mainstream media address the social connectedness provides its audiences other suggestions for social life but they didn’t fully explain the risks of having such fun. The overwhelming coverage on the economic optimistic theme and the social connectedness within the search results from “privacy and Foursquare” show that the privacy issue is not the key or the major concern of my sample content. Another interesting point is that the content retrieved is basically from America and Canada, only one article from China addressing the market in LBS. This is identical with my other study on the political impact of social media during Tunisian revolutions. In China, there is an app/service called Jiepang, which means “at the side of the street”, but the data from Chinese media seem completely absent. Chinese government has been very carefully about those LBS and other social media. It is interesting to explore why and how some countries are afraid of covering issues on newer communication technologies and tools. Chinese government has a very strict control on the Internet—Twitter, Facebook and Youtube have been blocked. Due to the nature of media, it is highly possible that in the future governments or policy makers in countries like China or even Russia their journalists would not cover the LBS as the same in the degree with the Western counterparts, even in economic terms. This study does have some limitations. Firstly, it only focus on the mainstream “texts” and does not look at how actual users’ responses towards Foursquare. For example there are a lot of people sharing their check-ins and mayorships with friends on Twitter and Facebook, but some may not. Secondly, with the findings and discussion, I feel a quantitative study is necessary and needed for my follow-up investigation. This study does not answer the questions like whether the themes vary by different media types, and what is the variance across different outlets and regions. Third, the sample is consisted of 250 news articles but the sampling strategy can be improved in the follow-up study, for example the choosing of search keys may block out some other topics.
References: Arceneaux, N. (2005). The World is a phone booth: The American response to mobile phones, 1981-2000. Convergence 11(2): 23-31. Arceneaux, N. &Schmitz Weiss, A.(2010). Seems stupid until you try it: press coverage of Twitter, 2006-9. New Media and Society 12(8). Carey, J. (1989). Communication as culture. New York: Roudedge. Cogan, B. (2005). "Framing usefulness:" An examination of journalistic coverage of the personal computer from 1982-1984. Southern Communication Journal, 70(3), 248-265. Retrieved from EBSCOhost. Davis, B. (1984, March 14). Increasing popularity of personal computer. Wall Street Journal (XMe ed.), p. 1. Entman, Robert M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43 (4), 51-58. Espinoza, F., Persson, P., Sandin, A., Nyström, H., Cacciatore. E. and Bylund, M., 2001. GeoNotes: Social and Navigational Aspects of Location-Based Information Systems. In: Abowd, Brumitt and Shafer, ed. Ubicomp 2001: Ubiquitous Computing., International Conference, September 30 – October 2, Atlanta, Georgia. Berlin: Springer, 2-17. (Download) Gamson, W. A., & Modigliani, A. (1987). The changing culture of affirmative action. In R. Braungart (Ed.), Research in political sociology (pp. 137-177). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Gitlin,T.(1980).The whole world’s watching. Berkeley:University of California Press. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Innis, H. (1951). The bias of communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Katz, E., & Dayan, D. (1994). Media events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kranzberg, M. (1985). “The information age: evolution or revolution?” In Information Technologies and Social Transformation, edited by Bruce R. Guile, 35-55.Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Morovoz, E. (2011). The net delusion: the dark side of Internet freedom. PublicAffairs. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), 2005. Open Location Services 1.1. . Pan, Z. D., & Kosicki, G. M. (1993). Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse. Political Communication, 10, 55-75. Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Penguin Books. Rogers, 1995. Diffusion of innovations. Rossler P (2001). Between online heaven and cyberhell: The framing of ‘the internet’ by traditional media coverage in Germany. New Media & Society 3(1): 49-66. Virrantaus, K., Markkula, J., Garmash, A., Terziyan, Y.V., 2001. Developing GIS-Supported Location- Based Services. In: Proc. of WGIS’2001 – First International Workshop on Web Geographical Information Systems., Kyoto, Japan. , 423–432.
Title: Check in or Opt out: Public Response to Foursquare
sample:listed is the total number of articles retrieved, and this paper uses 20% of them
Foursquare and privacy:
March 12, 2010—March 11, 2011
Newspapers: 354
Magazines: 83
Blogs: 642
Foursquare and privacy:
March 11, 2009— March 11, 2010:
Newspapers: 97
Magazines: 9
Blogs: 62
Positive themes:
New sensibility
Commercial use
civic use*
Negative themes:
Introducation
Following the development in wireless communication, applications and network technologies, mobility and Location Based Services (LBS) play an important role in people’s life. The most recent report from the Pew Internet Project shows that four percent of online adults use LBS to share their location and find people nearby. LBS such as Foursquare and Gowalla allow people to use mobile devices to notify others their physical location by checking in to that location. Prior to their existence, the disputes about the functionality of the geolocation technologies have been heated with regard to the using, managing and regulating of devices and services. The discussion is not only relevant to a new technology where techno-philes and techno-skeptics may disagree with each other but also relevant to issues such as the users’ privacy and participation.
Previous studies show that there have been different trends in discourse about a new technology, from the era of telegraph, telephone, television to personal computers and the Internet use. The study to be presented uses discourse about Foursquare in world press coverage as an example to examine public response to LBS through the use of language and repetition of the dominate themes. It is meaningful to identify the key themes in the public responses to LBS, which would later influence the diffusion of such applications and services.
Literature Review
Diffusion of Technology
Framing of the Diffusion
Previous technologies in literature: trends
Why does the media coverage matter?
Surveillance and participation in literature
Brief History of LBS and Foursquare
Previous studies discussing the technology trends:
positive to negative: From the utopian hopes for new(er) media technolog to the critics of the technolgy: Blondheim (1994), Czitrom (1992), Martin (1988)
public's positive responses to new technology: Korean study (2005), Rossler's German study (2001), newer journal articles on the using of mobile devices in 2004/2008 U.S. elections
negative to positive: mobile phones/telephones
Theory: social construction theories of technology
RQ1: How did different world major publications frame the LBS, particularly Foursquare?
RQ2: Did the major publications differ in the how they framed Foursquare?
Sample: Random news coverage retrieved from Lexisnexis from Mar 11, 2009. There are 700+, I may do half of it.
For the frames, I will use the news coverage of Internet from four dimensions: (Rossler, 2001; Ghanem, 1997)
1. Presence (the mentioning of the App, the brief introduction to the function, use and price, etc.)
2. Subtopics(whether it is discussed under other topics)
3. Argumentation patterns as cognitive attributes
The euphoric pattern: media revolution
economically optimistic pattern: the contribution to economic growth,
political action pattern: to improve the political system/context in regards to people's social life
relativizting pattern: no facilitation to everyday life..
economically pessimistic pattern
political criticism pattern
apocalyptic pattern: a disaster for individuals and the society
4. Perceived consequences as affective attributes:
Emancipation: whether the Internet, here the App, leads people to be active
Democratization: decrease the discrimination of certain groups in regards to their use
displinary action: opposite to emancipation frame, which keeps people under pressure though their acts look transparent
polarization: deepen social inequality
5. Privacy-related*
Update: Mar 2
Data will be retrieved from Lexisnexis, from Mar 11, 2009 (the day it came to exist) to now.
Only world major publications will be included. - Be precise about which ones and why. What constitutes a "world major publication?"
I went to Lexisnexis, and I just did a general search under the major world publications. I may want to use the newspapers. It includes magazines and newspapers basically from the U.S. but therer are some articles from Europe and Asia as well.
By including news articles from other countries/cultures, it would have some implications in a global context. - I think I know what you mean, but this is an awkward sentence. Also, are you sure Foursquare is that widely used globally?
Yes, it may not be the exactly the same Foursquare, or the app won't be alled the same. For example, in China there is an app called "Jiepang", which means "just by the street"; and there are some indication that Foursquare is going to join the Chinese market by purchasing it.
Code book will be followed. - Which code book? Are you coming up with one, or using one that already exists, modifying one, etc.?
Rossler's study of the Internet identifies four dimensions of the Internet in press coverage: the presence, subtopics, cognitive attributes and affective attributes. I am not sure whether I will follow the exact model, but I will decide when I finish a small sample of my bigger sample.
For many of the news articles, they still have the "presence" (or explanation) frame embedded in the story and they also have the affective attribute frame as well. However, I feel there are more themes to be added, such as privacy, participation and audience framing of the App. For example, in some articles, it asks questions about whether the readers still want to use the app if they are exposed to the Big Brother or been tracked by other people (eg, in Korea, the wife may want to use this to track her husband's activities). In this case, I will use a revised code book.
Topic:
I am interested in how the mainstream media (especially newspapers) discuss the issues with people using Apps. It is interesting to analyze the media's framing of Apps, which might eventually influence people use of mobile devices and some specific Apps. Borrowed from previous studies, there are different trends in academic or popular discussion about the new technology, from the era of telegraph, telephone, television to personal computers and the Internet use. I want to firstly identify the current trend of media discourse of Apps to see whether some of the previous frames are transferrable in regards to Apps. A qualitative textual analysis will be included to see what exactly have been said when they talk about the trends. For this paper, I may use some (or one) location-based Apps as my case, for example, Foursquare. If possible, I'd like to design/propose a survey study to further discuss the framing of new technology (Apps) on the users' level.
Previous studies discussing the technology trends:
positive to negative: From the utopian hopes for new(er) media technolog to the critics of the technolgy: Blondheim (1994), Czitrom (1992), Martin (1988)
public's positive responses to new technology: Korean study (2005), Rossler's German study (2001), newer journal articles on the using of mobile devices in 2004/2008 U.S. elections
negative to positive: mobile phones/telephones
Theory: social construction theories of technology
Henry Jenkins: participatory culture [this might be a bit of a stretch - how does it relate to coverage of apps?]
Van Dijck: In his discussion of the user-generated content agencies, he points out that people on those sites may have different levels of participatoin. If that is true to the UGC, is that also transferrable to the discussin of Apps? [UGC and apps do not seem very related to me, what is their connection?]
To Steve: I chose those because I wanted to see whether the public responses or the newspaper framing of Foursquare whether touch the issues of different levels of participation. - I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that you want to see whether newspapers touch on the issue of different levels of participation among Foursquare users? That seems relatively narrow.
---yes, I agree. I looked them again and I found it would be better if I just have frames or topic to code. If I can identify any mentioning of the participation, I can do a textual analysis to see how exactly the participation is framed.
Cases/examples: Apps have a location-based service feature.
Possible frames/topics to code:
Introducation to the app (whether the news article mentions the basic explanation of the app, such as function, price, users)
Improvement of business performance (eg, Magazine talks about how the location-based app prompts the visits to different stores)
Political engagement (eg, any mention of protests, etc.)
Except the specific topics, I will also take notes of the attitude of the news article, especially the tone, choice of words and the source of information.
Why am I interested in this topic: After last week's class, I started using Foursquare and I shared on Facebook. One of my friends posted a comment expressing he was scared by this App and the idea of location-based services. He approaches the app from the legal and surveillance aspect, and I asked other people about their feelings toward the specific app and other apps in general. They think differently than I expect, so I started to think about how the mainstream media talk about the apps? To what extent the media framing can function to help people make their decisions on adopting or refusing a new app or technology?
References:
Diffusion of innovations
Karaganis, J. (2007). Structures of particiption in digital culture.Ed. 2007
Technological substitution in mobile communications.
Last year, when Facebook decided to launch Facebook Place, media devote their coverage to discuss the issues with the Location-based services (LBS). Foursquare, one of various LBS apps, has been introduced in the terms like “business model of 2011” or “business frontier”. LBS is not a new term, or at least it could be traced back to many old-fashion aspects of life, but social networking, Internet and mobile devices together make it special—even Foursquare has its Foursquare Day on April 16 in many states in America. Based on the previous researches studying the media representation of the technology diffuse, this study examines some world major newspapers, magazines and blogs to provide themes of the public responses to Foursquare. Born with the concern of surveillance and privacy issues, it is interesting to explore the media discourse on these conflicts.
During Foursquare two-year history, other apps and sites, for instance Please Rob Me, were created to increase the awareness of using Foursquare especially related to privacy issues. With the potential risks to the users’ privacy on LBS, the government administration and experts were all starting working to increase the legislation of Internet privacy. The LBS service providers have been working and updating on their private policy. The providers say that the users have all the right to opt out anything and they can choose what information they want to share with those whom they select.
The aim of this analysis is to identify the dominate theme in the news coverage of Foursquare by the world newspapers, magazines and weblogs from March 2009 to March 2011. It extends the researches on the public responses to a new technology and how it is socially constructed through various mainstream media; and it also provides a comparison between the media discourse of other social media and LBS for the future study.
"Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral."
The first decade of the 21st century is the period in which mobile technology has been leading the way to new computing applications, which is almost the same as the first decade 30 years ago. In the 1980s, personal computer revolution was a successful in America with various factors including advertising and social exchange within groups, making the personal computer “a standard part of the typical American household”(Cogan,2005). For example, seen as the most influential computer during that time, in the year of 1984, Apple advertised Macintosh with the introduction of the user graphic interface and mouse (Cogan, 2005) and also with the implication of that their computer could bring a different world which was not like 1984 articulated by George Orwell. Not only Apple, other companies, such as Xerox, Commodore, Digital Equipment Company and IBM were sharing the market in the computer industry. It was also estimated a huge increase of new Americans getting home computers in the early days of the 1980s (Davis, 1983, p. 1). But, why were there such huge groups of consumers and increases in the computer industry? Scholars (Kumar, 2001; Deluca & Peeples, 2002, Cogan, 2005; also see Katz & Dayan, 1994) turn to examine the media content and public perception towards the introduction of personal computers; introduction of personal computer has been framed as inevitable, necessary and unavoidable (Cogan, 2005).
When it comes to other theorists of new technologies, a school of researchers (Innis, 1951; Mumfold, 1963; Postman, 1985) argue that the new technologies bring substantial changes to the social, political and economic structures. Marvin (1988) suggests that the changes are a complicated process involving the negotiations between people and forms of mass media and new technologies. She notes that “the introduction of new media is a special historical occasion when patterns anchored in older media that have provided the stable currency of social exchange are reexamined, challenged and defended.”(p. 4) As the media discourse of personal computers attracts those scholars, Internet has become another important area where its diffusion and use have been studied. Rossler’s (2001) study finds that the German magazine, between January 1995 and June 1998, covered Internet in the same overwhelmingly positive way as personal computer was portrayed in America. The research shows that the German magazines approach the multimedia been perceived as a “media revolution” with useful outcomes for communication in the society and also shows the magazine coverage favors the economically optimistic pattern— Internet been credited as a factor of economic revolution leading to “economic growth, international competitiveness and the creation of new jobs.” (Rossler, 2001) But other scholars (Wellman, 1999; Cornish, 2008) find some negative pattern in studies of the Internet. Wellman (1999) focuses on the notion of community created and used with the computer mediated communication—the Internet actually separates its users from real social relationship. Cornish’s (2008) study concerns that when Internet approaches to a wider range of users, some vague worries become “crystallized” with many issues such as hackers, privacy, pornography and information overload.
In addition to personal computer and Internet, a body of previous studies on the media discourse and public responses to the diffusion of technologies reveals different themes. Arceneaux (2005) examines the responses to mobile phones in America in 1981 to 2001, and the findings suggest that the diffusion of mobile phones encourages tolerance, such as people see speaking in public with a handheld device as normal behaviors. Therefore, the violation of established etiquette and social protocol is no longer been perceived as negative. However, other technologies challenging the established social protocols are studied as examples which having the reversed pattern of media representation of technology diffusion, such as telegraph, early radio and other electronic devices (Blondheim, 1994; Czitrom, 1982; Marvin 1988 and Covert, 1994). Arceneaux and Schmitz Weiss (2010) argue that Twitter and telegraph disturb the established concepts of communication, particularly the concepts of space and time and the differences between public and private sphere.
All the aforementioned arguments around the media representation of technology diffuse are informed by Melvin Kranzberg’s note–technology is not good, bad or neutral. His notion can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, the nature of the technology (or a specific technology or application software) and the way of its diffusion and use can be employed in different ways. For instance, in the recent years, social media have been constantly mentioned as a critical role in revolutions in different countries and regions. Morozov (2011) in his book The Net Delusion points out that in the process of democratization, Internet have been used as weapons to expedite the regime change such as in Iran but also been used to strengthen the authoritarian control in countries like China and Russia. Secondly, how people perceive the good or evil side of technology also depend on the way they are informed by their information sources, the media framing, which is also the theoretical background of my analysis.
Framing theory is often used to understand communication and the behaviors in many fields (e.g. Goffman, 1974; Gamson & Modigliani, 1987; Pan and Kosicki, 1993; Tuchman, 1978, Gitlin, 1980). Goffman claims that the frame, as the “schemata of interpretation”, enables people “to locate, perceive, identify and label.” (Goffman, 1974, p.21) Tuchman brings the concept of story frame into the operation of news, which she says to report news is usually more like to tell a story rather than the truth of what has actually happened.
In regards to the specific news channel, Marvin (1988) argues that newspapers functioned as “arenas for negotiating issues critical to the conduct of social order” (p.8), assuming the shifts of written discourse of a technology shows the shifts in the public perception and discourse including “who is inside and who is outside, who may speak and who may not and who has authority and may be believed” (p.4). Because individuals can not experience the whole world ourselves, Gitlin (1980) suggests that people are dependent on the mass media which creates different frames or “patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol handlers routinely organize discourse whether verbal or visual.”(p.7)
"I am so totally, digitally close to you."
New communication technologies give people platforms for various uses (Castells et al., 2007) “on the basis of independent channels of autonomous communication from person to person.” The networks among people can be easily established by the mobile telephony, which has been increasing dramatically worldwide. For example, in the Middle East, the penetration of mobile-phone was 16.59 percent in 2002 with a yearly increase of 30 percent (Ford, 2003). The mobile telephony, because of its wide availability of individually controlled communication, makes it possible for people not to rely solely on mass media but to form a new space, either private or public. So it is necessary to examine the news representation of the use of mobile devices’ personal activities in public space. The development of mobile telephony, as argued earlier, increases the use of technology for surveillance such as police use, transportation, news reporting, entertainment, which also raises the privacy issue at the same time.
As discussed in the beginning, the new computing apps on mobile devices allow people to access their emails, e-commerce or e-business, which Nickerson et al. suggest that now those names could be changed into m-commerce, m-business and m-dating (Nickerson et al., 2007). They also argue that the new apps offer anytime computer and a newer anywhere computing, which is location-based. What should be notified is that scholars point out the location-based information is not new with the mobile devices. Espinoza et al. (2001) point out that the position-specific information exists long before. The location-/position-specific information can be exchanged in one-to-one communication such as notes and graffiti, or sometimes it can inform its local mass audience by posters with events or traffic signal with navigation. However, current LBS allow the probability for two-way or multi-way communication and interactivity. Steiniger et al. describe the model as the users inform the providers their context, needs and position; and the provider of location services deliver the corresponding information to the users. The increasing number of mobile phones and other devices makes such model possible for people not only to gather geographic information such as looking for a restaurant on the maps but also allow them to show their presence of that place and generate information, where the interaction can take place among the users.
Virrantaus et al. (2001) define LBS as “information services accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the location of the mobile device.” International OpenGeospatial Consortium (2005) provides another definition of LBS as “a wireless-IP service that uses geographic information to serve a mobile user, any application service that exploits the position of a mobile terminal.” To be able to use LBS, there are several components: mobile devices, communication network or positioning component (Global Positioning System), service and app provider and content and data provider. The definitions and components emphasize the location of the users through network service, which draws attention to the concern of privacy in the public places and during the data exchange. Barkhuus’ (2006) study on privacy in LBS, using two cases, shows that users have initially concerns on the privacy issues involved with LBS. More interestingly the study also shows that after the actual use of LBS, privacy becomes a less concern than the initial stage.
Given a lack of study on the public response to LBS, this study can extend the discussion on LBS and privacy issue by analyzing the media content on Foursquare and privacy. It also re-explores the previous studies on the public response towards the diffusion of technology, and examines their approaches and findings to see whether they are transferable to the media discourse on LBS.
Method
The study proceeded from an analysis of the frames and tones used by a wide range of world major publications. At this stage, the study is concerned with media content on Foursquare and privacy by world newspapers, magazines and weblogs from March 12, 2009 to March 12, 2011 (both days included), the period after Foursquare has been created for two years. The decision to examine the world newspaper is driven by the nature of the issue. Prior researches (Nelkin, 1991) suggest that when it comes to complex issues such as wars (Stromback, 2005), printed channels such as newspapers provide more in-depth information than other media. Another motivation is that because the newspapers and magazines have still a large audience, they are also considered to “uphold an important democratic and informative role for opinion information” (Sandberg, 2007). The decision to use weblogs in this analysis was followed by Arceneaux and Schmitz Weiss’ study on Twitter (2010).
To explore the public responses to Foursquare, this study combines the methods used in the previous researches on Twitter and Internet use (Arceneaux & Schmitz Weiss, 2010; Rossler, 2001). Using the grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), the analysis process borrowed the themes and subtopics from those studies. The sample content was coded (open-coding format, also see Arceneaux & Schmitz and Weiss, 2010) into different categories and the corresponding notes were taken during the process.
For this study, I drew 20% of all the articles included both of Foursquare and privacy during the date (see Table 1). Repeated stories are treated as one story and finally 251 news articles were coded. All the news stories were collected online from Lexisnexis academic database. All the population and sample content are shown in Table 1, and it is obvious that the coverage on Foursquare increased in the second year. Same as the increase of coverage on Twitter, weblog has the highest increase from my population content, which increased from 62 to 642 and followed by newspapers from 97 to 354.
Table 1. “Foursquare and privacy” content by media type and year (March 2009 to March 2011)
Consistent with the previous on Twitter, among the sample content, the most prominent theme discovered was the Explanation theme. As a new site, app and company, the news coverage on Foursquare or even the mention of Foursquare explained what Foursquare is and its use. Interestingly, the news stories not only explain Foursquare, but they use Foursquare as an explanation to other service.
Because the analysis aims to find coverage on both Foursquare and privacy, I decided to use two dichotomies in deciding the themes. The overwhelming majority of news coverage uses the Positive theme in the articles. Within in Positive themes, several subcategories were created: economical optimistic view; social connectedness and users’ opt-out. Only a few stories have a strong Negative theme towards Foursquare in regards to privacy, but the findings have explored some negative or skeptic subthemes such as the privacy of others, information overload and user skills.
Explanation Theme
News articles especially data retrieved from 2009 to 2010 presented the explanation of Foursquare whenever the name of the app or the company appears. At the earlier stage, the explanation was on Foursquare company itself and its founders, where the news articles provided a detailed history of the creator and the company. For instance the first news article in my sample content was by the Financial Times on March 25, 2009, provided a very detail of the history of the company:
Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 but did nothing with the service, and its founders left in 2007, disappointed at the lack of attention their product had received. Jaiku, bought later that year, also failed to make the grade at Google. It was freed by Google in January as open-source software for others to develop if they wished, while Dodgeball was finally closed down this month. Within days, its founders had launched a new product called Foursquare, restarting four years later their idea of a location-based Twitter-type service.
Another popular theme under explanation is that the news articles try to explain the features of the app, and most of them are associated with the words such as “check in” and location:
Just as online services like Twitter and Facebook let people update their friends on what they are doing, a new service called Foursquare (http://foursquare.com) allows users to tell their friends where they are.
Foursquare members ''check in'' by cell phone at locations around the city, from bars, restaurants and coffee shops to galleries, grocery stores and gyms. By sending up a flare marking wherever they are, users can alert their friends to come join them.
It is interesting to note that, at the early stage, the introduction to Foursquare usually appear as one of the well-known social media such as Twitter and Facebook, but another very important finding is that gradually the journalists and bloggers use Foursquare to explain the new features or activities launched by Facebook or a completely new service:
Now Facebook has its own offering, Facebook Places, expect more brands to look into location-based marketing using old kids on the block such as Foursquare but also newbies popping up now that Facebook has opted in.
Positive Themes
Economic optimistic view towards Foursquare and other LBS are the most dominate subtheme founded in the positive themes. The economic optimistic view consider the privacy a minor or secondary issue when it comes to the discussion about a new start-up or well-established social media/company goes to invest money in LBS. The journalists and bloggers concern the possibility to succeed in the market or the gaining of new users more than the privacy.
Foursquare's growth shows no sign of slowing with the first million users taking 12 months to acquire and the second million only three. So how is it going to make money? Famously, Twitter only launched its own commercial model - embeddable tweet-adverts - a few weeks ago, some four years after its creation. Foursquare, with several partnership deals already in place and a $20m cash injection from the likes of Facebook board member and Twitter investor Marc Andreessen, appears quicker off the blocks.
Another subtheme uncovered is the social connectedness, in which the articles would address how importantly it is to connected with friends, families and colleagues; some articles mention the privacy concerns, but the journalists and bloggers shift the privacy issue very easily into the fun and coolness of the app, such as the mayorship in Foursquare. For example:
Social networks are great for staying connected to family and friends, but you must be as careful as you would be on a phone call with a friend knowing strangers are listening too.
Foursquare's not a tool for better and more polite stalking - at least not directly. Instead, it's a social city guide and online game.
The last but not least important finding from the Positive theme is the users’ opt-out theme, where the news articles use various sources such as the interview with people working in the privacy lab at Foursquare, or direct quotes from Foursquare’s privacy policy or so-called technologists to explain the improvement of privacy settings on this app. When talking about the improvement, they are likely to provide the updating policies, which makes the process is ongoing and they would not stop updating:
On Aug. 17, Foursquare updated its privacy policy and policy 101 page, both can be viewed at the bottom of Foursquare's website. They are marked "new." Kalamazoo users Sarah Lee and Enrique Martinez suggested using Foursquare like any other social-networking vehicle -- use caution about the information you put out there and consider using the "off the grid" option.
When talking about the “off the grid” option, which is the focus of the opt-out theme, the journalists use the aforementioned sources to reassure the readers that the users can totally opt out and they can decide what privacy setting they want—share with all people, friends or nobody. Because typically in the same articles, the journalists would mention Foursquare does not track users, so the use of such an opt-out theme may function as reassurance to the users:
Sharing: You have the option of keeping your check-ins private ("off the grid") or sharing them via Twitter and Facebook. If you want to share them, link to them in your settings.
News articles also use quotes to show how to deal with young kids using Foursquare and how easily to “opt-out” when talking about the privacy issues in general in all social networking sites:
“If you know at least know the key words, know what Foursquare is, know what Gowalla is, Facebook and Twitter, and know what they do, and maybe sit down with your kids and go through the privacy settings, to make sure they're protected, I think that is a great step in the right direction.”
However, this subtheme is the most “attacked” and criticized aspect of privacy in Fousquare by other journalists and bloggers.
Negative Themes
Overall, the negative themes towards Foursquare and privacy are not obvious in my sample content. The most dominate negative theme is the concern of others’ privacy: mostly, friends and families. The articles explain how “check in” works and it would turn very skeptical about whether the friends you tag in the “check in” care about their privacy; and some news articles concern about the cybercriminals, who might stalk people to their regular check-ins; and issues also revolves around the check-ins of the parents—if the parents check in at some other places than home (or even home is a very “dangerous” check-in) it means your kids would be left alone at home. The finding also shows that bloggers have more concerns about those issues other than the newspapers and magazines. For example:
But recent geolocation technology such as Foursquare and Facebook's Places feature, which allow users to "check in" to an exact location on a map and see who else is there, are ratcheting up concerns that more abuse will occur, putting young people at risk
Another negative theme towards privacy and Foursquare is the discussion of the users’ online skills, which serves as a response to the “opt-out” theme, and most of the criticism comes from bloggers as well. By talking about the users’ online skills, the bloggers point to the default setting of Foursquare or other social networking sites such as Facebook—your checkins and your profiles are open to public if you do not opt out or change the settings. The bloggers blame the providers because they notice that not everyone is technology savvy and there may be many under-aged teens or young kids using such app.
Discussion and Limitation
By studying the news coverage on Foursquare and privacy, this analysis finds that the most dominate theme is positive theme, which means more people would check in on those LBS. The economic optimistic view of Foursquare is the most popular subtheme used by journalists and bloggers, which also means the diffusion of Foursquare would still be positive by the media coverage. News articles echo the previous researches on the introduction of personal computers and Twitter, where during that period of time the news talked about the market, the companies and their popularity among users. The preference on the economic optimistic theme could help promote the diffusion of the new app and the company. The economic optimist view is not only towards Foursquare but the similar services, and some articles clearly state that the LBS will lead the Internet business and Foursquare serves as a model of successful business. The emphasis on the market or the economic prosperity of LBS may direct people’s concern to different direction other than privacy. Another area, which the media have been very positive too, can promote the diffusion is the social connectedness/coolness of using LBS. This also recalls Barkhuus’ findings that the actual use of LBS can eliminate some of the concerns on privacy. The mainstream media address the social connectedness provides its audiences other suggestions for social life but they didn’t fully explain the risks of having such fun. The overwhelming coverage on the economic optimistic theme and the social connectedness within the search results from “privacy and Foursquare” show that the privacy issue is not the key or the major concern of my sample content.
Another interesting point is that the content retrieved is basically from America and Canada, only one article from China addressing the market in LBS. This is identical with my other study on the political impact of social media during Tunisian revolutions. In China, there is an app/service called Jiepang, which means “at the side of the street”, but the data from Chinese media seem completely absent. Chinese government has been very carefully about those LBS and other social media. It is interesting to explore why and how some countries are afraid of covering issues on newer communication technologies and tools. Chinese government has a very strict control on the Internet—Twitter, Facebook and Youtube have been blocked. Due to the nature of media, it is highly possible that in the future governments or policy makers in countries like China or even Russia their journalists would not cover the LBS as the same in the degree with the Western counterparts, even in economic terms.
This study does have some limitations. Firstly, it only focus on the mainstream “texts” and does not look at how actual users’ responses towards Foursquare. For example there are a lot of people sharing their check-ins and mayorships with friends on Twitter and Facebook, but some may not. Secondly, with the findings and discussion, I feel a quantitative study is necessary and needed for my follow-up investigation. This study does not answer the questions like whether the themes vary by different media types, and what is the variance across different outlets and regions. Third, the sample is consisted of 250 news articles but the sampling strategy can be improved in the follow-up study, for example the choosing of search keys may block out some other topics.
References:
Arceneaux, N. (2005). The World is a phone booth: The American response to mobile phones, 1981-2000. Convergence 11(2): 23-31.
Arceneaux, N. &Schmitz Weiss, A.(2010). Seems stupid until you try it: press coverage of Twitter, 2006-9. New Media and Society 12(8).
Carey, J. (1989). Communication as culture. New York: Roudedge.
Cogan, B. (2005). "Framing usefulness:" An examination of journalistic coverage of the personal computer from 1982-1984. Southern Communication Journal, 70(3), 248-265. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Davis, B. (1984, March 14). Increasing popularity of personal computer. Wall Street Journal (XMe ed.), p. 1.
Entman, Robert M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43 (4), 51-58.
Espinoza, F., Persson, P., Sandin, A., Nyström, H., Cacciatore. E. and Bylund, M., 2001. GeoNotes: Social and Navigational Aspects of Location-Based Information Systems. In: Abowd, Brumitt and Shafer, ed. Ubicomp 2001: Ubiquitous Computing., International Conference, September 30 – October 2, Atlanta, Georgia. Berlin: Springer, 2-17. (Download)
Gamson, W. A., & Modigliani, A. (1987). The changing culture of affirmative action. In R. Braungart (Ed.), Research in political sociology (pp. 137-177). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Gitlin,T.(1980).The whole world’s watching. Berkeley:University of California Press.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Innis, H. (1951). The bias of communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Katz, E., & Dayan, D. (1994). Media events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kranzberg, M. (1985). “The information age: evolution or revolution?” In Information Technologies and Social Transformation, edited by Bruce R. Guile, 35-55.Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Morovoz, E. (2011). The net delusion: the dark side of Internet freedom. PublicAffairs.Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), 2005. Open Location Services 1.1. .
Pan, Z. D., & Kosicki, G. M. (1993). Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse. Political Communication, 10, 55-75.
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Penguin Books.
Rogers, 1995. Diffusion of innovations.
Rossler P (2001). Between online heaven and cyberhell: The framing of ‘the internet’ by traditional media coverage in Germany. New Media & Society 3(1): 49-66.
Virrantaus, K., Markkula, J., Garmash, A., Terziyan, Y.V., 2001. Developing GIS-Supported Location- Based Services. In: Proc. of WGIS’2001 – First International Workshop on Web Geographical Information Systems., Kyoto, Japan. , 423–432.
Title: Check in or Opt out: Public Response to Foursquare
sample:listed is the total number of articles retrieved, and this paper uses 20% of them
Foursquare and privacy:
March 12, 2010—March 11, 2011
Newspapers: 354
Magazines: 83
Blogs: 642
Foursquare and privacy:
March 11, 2009— March 11, 2010:
Newspapers: 97
Magazines: 9
Blogs: 62
Positive themes:
New sensibility
Commercial use
civic use*
Negative themes:
Introducation
Following the development in wireless communication, applications and network technologies, mobility and Location Based Services (LBS) play an important role in people’s life. The most recent report from the Pew Internet Project shows that four percent of online adults use LBS to share their location and find people nearby. LBS such as Foursquare and Gowalla allow people to use mobile devices to notify others their physical location by checking in to that location. Prior to their existence, the disputes about the functionality of the geolocation technologies have been heated with regard to the using, managing and regulating of devices and services. The discussion is not only relevant to a new technology where techno-philes and techno-skeptics may disagree with each other but also relevant to issues such as the users’ privacy and participation.
Previous studies show that there have been different trends in discourse about a new technology, from the era of telegraph, telephone, television to personal computers and the Internet use. The study to be presented uses discourse about Foursquare in world press coverage as an example to examine public response to LBS through the use of language and repetition of the dominate themes. It is meaningful to identify the key themes in the public responses to LBS, which would later influence the diffusion of such applications and services.
Literature Review
Diffusion of Technology
Framing of the Diffusion
- Previous technologies in literature: trends
- Why does the media coverage matter?
- Surveillance and participation in literature
Brief History of LBS and FoursquarePrevious studies discussing the technology trends:
Theory: social construction theories of technology
RQ1: How did different world major publications frame the LBS, particularly Foursquare?
RQ2: Did the major publications differ in the how they framed Foursquare?
Sample: Random news coverage retrieved from Lexisnexis from Mar 11, 2009. There are 700+, I may do half of it.
For the frames, I will use the news coverage of Internet from four dimensions: (Rossler, 2001; Ghanem, 1997)
1. Presence (the mentioning of the App, the brief introduction to the function, use and price, etc.)
2. Subtopics(whether it is discussed under other topics)
3. Argumentation patterns as cognitive attributes
- The euphoric pattern: media revolution
- economically optimistic pattern: the contribution to economic growth,
- political action pattern: to improve the political system/context in regards to people's social life
- relativizting pattern: no facilitation to everyday life..
- economically pessimistic pattern
- political criticism pattern
- apocalyptic pattern: a disaster for individuals and the society
4. Perceived consequences as affective attributes:- Emancipation: whether the Internet, here the App, leads people to be active
- Democratization: decrease the discrimination of certain groups in regards to their use
- displinary action: opposite to emancipation frame, which keeps people under pressure though their acts look transparent
- polarization: deepen social inequality
5. Privacy-related*Update: Mar 2
Data will be retrieved from Lexisnexis, from Mar 11, 2009 (the day it came to exist) to now.
Only world major publications will be included. - Be precise about which ones and why. What constitutes a "world major publication?"
I went to Lexisnexis, and I just did a general search under the major world publications. I may want to use the newspapers. It includes magazines and newspapers basically from the U.S. but therer are some articles from Europe and Asia as well.
By including news articles from other countries/cultures, it would have some implications in a global context. - I think I know what you mean, but this is an awkward sentence. Also, are you sure Foursquare is that widely used globally?
Yes, it may not be the exactly the same Foursquare, or the app won't be alled the same. For example, in China there is an app called "Jiepang", which means "just by the street"; and there are some indication that Foursquare is going to join the Chinese market by purchasing it.
Code book will be followed. - Which code book? Are you coming up with one, or using one that already exists, modifying one, etc.?
Rossler's study of the Internet identifies four dimensions of the Internet in press coverage: the presence, subtopics, cognitive attributes and affective attributes. I am not sure whether I will follow the exact model, but I will decide when I finish a small sample of my bigger sample.
For many of the news articles, they still have the "presence" (or explanation) frame embedded in the story and they also have the affective attribute frame as well. However, I feel there are more themes to be added, such as privacy, participation and audience framing of the App. For example, in some articles, it asks questions about whether the readers still want to use the app if they are exposed to the Big Brother or been tracked by other people (eg, in Korea, the wife may want to use this to track her husband's activities). In this case, I will use a revised code book.
Topic:
I am interested in how the mainstream media (especially newspapers) discuss the issues with people using Apps. It is interesting to analyze the media's framing of Apps, which might eventually influence people use of mobile devices and some specific Apps. Borrowed from previous studies, there are different trends in academic or popular discussion about the new technology, from the era of telegraph, telephone, television to personal computers and the Internet use. I want to firstly identify the current trend of media discourse of Apps to see whether some of the previous frames are transferrable in regards to Apps. A qualitative textual analysis will be included to see what exactly have been said when they talk about the trends. For this paper, I may use some (or one) location-based Apps as my case, for example, Foursquare. If possible, I'd like to design/propose a survey study to further discuss the framing of new technology (Apps) on the users' level.
Previous studies discussing the technology trends:
Theory: social construction theories of technology
Henry Jenkins: participatory culture [this might be a bit of a stretch - how does it relate to coverage of apps?]
Van Dijck: In his discussion of the user-generated content agencies, he points out that people on those sites may have different levels of participatoin. If that is true to the UGC, is that also transferrable to the discussin of Apps? [UGC and apps do not seem very related to me, what is their connection?]
To Steve: I chose those because I wanted to see whether the public responses or the newspaper framing of Foursquare whether touch the issues of different levels of participation. - I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that you want to see whether newspapers touch on the issue of different levels of participation among Foursquare users? That seems relatively narrow.
---yes, I agree. I looked them again and I found it would be better if I just have frames or topic to code. If I can identify any mentioning of the participation, I can do a textual analysis to see how exactly the participation is framed.
Cases/examples: Apps have a location-based service feature.
Possible frames/topics to code:
Except the specific topics, I will also take notes of the attitude of the news article, especially the tone, choice of words and the source of information.
Why am I interested in this topic: After last week's class, I started using Foursquare and I shared on Facebook. One of my friends posted a comment expressing he was scared by this App and the idea of location-based services. He approaches the app from the legal and surveillance aspect, and I asked other people about their feelings toward the specific app and other apps in general. They think differently than I expect, so I started to think about how the mainstream media talk about the apps? To what extent the media framing can function to help people make their decisions on adopting or refusing a new app or technology?
References:
Diffusion of innovations
Karaganis, J. (2007). Structures of particiption in digital culture.Ed. 2007
Technological substitution in mobile communications.
Youtube.
Cell phone culture