Using critical discourse analysis to identify historical socio-technical imaginaries
#essay, November 29, 2024

by Nathalie

Our media reality, like its history, is never purely material. A thoughtful exploration of any technological phenomenon requires an investigation into the socio-cultural contexts surrounding its development—whether during the early prototype stages in a lab or as it is adopted by diverse societal groups. This dive into the imaginative dimensions of media history is supported by long-standing scholarly traditions. As summarized by Natale and Balbi (2014), these traditions range from the US emphasis on the "technological sublime" to the media archeological approaches within media studies. While these frameworks differ—whether focusing on media fantasies, technological visions, or hegemonic narratives—they converge on a key point: understanding media history demands attention to the imaginary. This perspective calls for us to move beyond a singular, materially focused narrative.

In the context of the internet, scholars such as Fred Turner (2017) and Janet Abbate (2017) emphasize the plurality and cultural specificity of internet histories, inviting us to move beyond globalized, linear narratives of technological imagination. Turner frames the internet as infrastructure deeply shaped by cultural interpretation, while Abbate calls for plural, localized accounts that reflect diverse historical experiences. This aligns with an emerging trend in Internet History in the past years which acknowledges the coexistence of multiple visions of technology. Similarly, Paolo Bory’s exploration of internet myths and network ideologies in Italy exemplifies how national and cultural contexts can generate alternative imaginaries of the internet, challenging dominant global narratives and highlighting the need for more nuanced, situated understandings of technological development (2020). Studying localized socio-technical imaginaries can contribute to this.*

To write a history of past futures is to grapple with visions, hopes, and fantasies which is not straightforward to do. The concept of the imaginary itself is contested and reiterative—manifesting as social imaginaries, sociotechnical imaginaries, algorithmic imaginaries, and more—spanning media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. This theoretical complexity often overshadows methodological considerations. In this blogpost, I outline my approach to identifying sociotechnical imaginaries using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This text is not a comprehensive methodological study by any means, however, I hope this brief reflection offers guidance for others conducting similar research— this is Nathalie’s version, so to speak. Therefore, I refrained from writing a step-by-step guide as this is not sole way to do this, but I do hope this can be a helpful how-to text for other students or early career researchers.

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Identifying sociotechnical imaginaries: what to look for, and where?

For me, a crucial first step in the project was choosing a theoretical framework that aligns with the research objectives. In my case, I drew on Jasanoff and Kim’s (2015) concept of the socio-technical imaginary: “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures” (p. 4). My focus was the Dutch web from 1994 to 2004, examining its material and social dimensions and contextualizing dominant understandings of the web’s role within Dutch society in a historical narrative.

For this, CDA was an apt methodological choice, allowing me to analyze meaning as communicated through language in context. CDA is traditionally used to examine how discourse reproduces power relations and social inequalities (Wodak, 2001). In this study, I locate the production and enactment of power in dominant sociotechnical imaginaries of the web. Power, thus, is understood as the creation of normative ideologies, practices, and hegemonic social structures in which key groups, actors, or institutions arise. This research, specifically, is situated in a larger project that aims to unravel hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives, contributing to alternative readings of an idealized history and thus demystifying grand notions.

Identifying socio-technical imaginaries meant, for me, unraveling the meaning (common understanding of the web), morality (how life ought to be lived based on this meaning), and materiality (technological artifacts or initiatives) of the web over the course of 10 years. Ideally, a result of such a study is to present certain groups of imaginaries, either organized by themes, social groups, or in a chronological manner. Whilst the categorization based on recognizable patterns is fruitful and apt for the discussion of a cultural history, it should not diminish the fact that imaginaries are very complex, nuanced, and nonlinear in reality. Translating such a complex phenomenon into a neat categorization is presumably one of the more difficult parts of doing such a study.

Establishing the context of the period you study is a vital first step—though easier said than done. One must first grasp the socio-political landscape, important developments, and key actors during your period of interest before selecting materials for analysis. There are great sources (like this blogpost by Florian Schneider) describing this step to step process that I won’t repeat. However, I want to highlight two additional concepts that helped me structure the analysis as well as organize and communicate findings in a later stage.

Fields of Activities: inspired by systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Horsbøl & Lassen, 2011), this concept frames the topics discussed, participants involved, and the context of activity within a text. A field of activity could, for example, be a set of documents from a specific professional community that discuss an early web initiative.

Lifecycle Phase of the Medium: understanding whether your technological phenomenon can be defined as ‘future media’, ‘new media’, or ‘obsolete media’ will help you source your material, define relevant social groups, and structure how you want to approach your analysis. In an earlier blog post on Matter of Imagination titled The temporal turn in media imaginary research), I go into this in more detail. To give a brief example, if you study imaginaries of technologies that do not yet exist (yet), science fiction texts become a relevant source. In my case, studying the web in the 90s and early 00s, this novel technology already existed thus was interpreted differently by different groups – following a social constructivist framework framework (Pinch, & Bijker, 2012). Therefore, I focused more on public media coverage like newspapers and TV shows.

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Going Beyond Description: Critical Interpretation in CDA

Feedback I got on one of the first versions of my drafted research was something along the lines of ‘this is cool, but this is not a critical discourse analysis’. Merely describing imaginary themes and identifying metaphors was valuable but insufficient for a CDA. Additional coding and reviewing more literature helped refine my analysis. Below, I outline three strategies that sharpened the critical edge that allowed me to go deeper into creation of dominant imaginaries and related hegemonic groups.

Situating the imaginary historically and academically

Humanities research thrives on answering "why". For example, in exploring the web’s early 90s vision as a public domain, I situated this imaginary within Amsterdam’s 1990s alternative culture of artists, squatters, and activists, because the case studies this imaginary is based on emerged here. This local culture, in turn, was shaped by broader socio-political structures like the Dutch welfare state that was actually willing to subsidize such civic initiatives. Using literature on Europe’s history of tactical media (Apprich, 2017) also helps position the web was used for social and political change in this time period, since communication technology was believed to have this affordance. Linking such imaginaries to historical and academic contexts strengthens the explanatory power of the analysis. In other words, quite some contextual exploration outside your initial field of study is necessary

Analyzing rhetoric and discourse

Examining metaphors, rhetoric, or linguistic patterns reveals how imaginaries are constructed and communicated. Another way is to study how time is discursively constructed with a specific purpose in mind. I think the article Revolutionary dreams: Future essentialism and the sociotechnical imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark by Kasper Schiølin(2020) is a great example of this:

“In this article, I locate this trend of writing history in advance in three discourses pervading the imaginary [of the 4th industrial revolution]]: a discourse of the dialectics of pessimism and optimism, a discourse of epochalism, and a discourse of inevitability, all producing what I will conceptualize below as future essentialism” (p. 545).

Here, the critical relationship between ideology, rhetoric, and temporality becomes visible. Specifically in the context of sociotechnical imaginaries, which are often future-oriented, this nuance proved pivotal for me. I explore this too in the before-mentioned blogpost) on temporality in media research.

Tracing discursive effects and power relations

Finally, it is essential to analyze the broader effects of identified imaginaries and how this impacted certain power relations. Discursive effects can mean a range of things, and what to focus on depends on your research objective and lens of critical theory. Which actors formed a hegemonic position in the context of the imaginary, or who were discriminated against or forgotten because of it? Which policies were developed following the meaning of the imaginary? Using the public domain imaginary, in my research it becomes clear that the Amsterdam hacktivist class, and the early web initiatives that sprung from this context, became influential in what the web meant and what its purpose should be. These hegemonic actors gained power and were repeatedly asked for their opinion in news coverage, or by the state in official documents.

Zooming out and examining how Amsterdam’s early web initiatives became dominant in historical narratives, reveals how localized contexts are universalized in both Dutch historiography but also in general Internet History. The case of DDS received recognition in academic literature, with references by scholars such as Rheingold (1995), Castells (2001), and later Apprich (2017). Or in the chapter titled How Amsterdam invented the internet (Nevejan & Badenoch, 2013) as well as UNESCO’s acknowledgment of both DDS and XS4ALL as pioneering internet initiatives. This focus on Amsterdam reveals a metropolitan bias, potentially overlooking other regional internet efforts. For example, Knoware in Utrecht and IAF in Groningen offered public internet access before XS4ALL (De Bode & Teszelszky, 2021). This suggests that the socio-technical imaginary of the digital city is, whilst being recognized as influential and dominant, bound to specific field of activity and thus context. In other words, it is not all-encompassing.

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Reflections on the process

Historical research, particularly into the imaginative realm, demands time and an iterative approach. For me, the biggest challenge was embracing the interpretive and subjective aspects of CDA which I struggled with in the beginning as it felt not legitimate enough. What helped me, ultimately, was to read all kinds of work; primary sources, secondary reflections, scholarly works on the topic, and other exemplary studies of socio-technical imaginaries. This does blur the line between doing contextual research, an analysis, or a literature review–something I think is inevitable. What helped me in case of the latter is to make a distinction between the non-academic, contextual sources and the purposive sample materials that I used for CDA. During this, I kept a separate record of my selected discursive statements, or quotes, to refer back to when diving deeper into that connection of language, meaning, and imagination. A big step is accepting that you can not read everything and being aware of the limitations of sampling and thus, subsequently, your interpretation of history. At the same time, make sure that you understand why you choose your specific sources and why they are critical for your research's objective.

Ultimately, I found an abductive approach most effective. This iterative interplay between data collection, analysis, and theory (Kennedy & Thornburg, 2018) fosters a nuanced understanding of sociotechnical imaginaries. It encourages both theoretical grounding and openness to emerging insights—essential for untangling the complex web of media history and imagination.

I hope this post sparks reflection on how CDA can be useful in looking into sociotechnical imaginaries media history research. Do you find similar challenges in grounding imaginaries within historical contexts, or balancing thematic analysis with critical interpretation? I’d love to hear how others approach these complexities and whether you see value in some of the distinctions I’ve drawn or approaches taken. Again, I am, by no means, an expert and would love to hear feedback from others. Doing a CDA study is difficult and a daunting task I have come to experience. You can find some of the references cited below in our broader readings list in imaginaries—please don’t hesitate to reach out at n.fridzema[at]rug.nl with additional suggestions or thoughts!

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References

Apprich, C. (2017). Technotopia: A media genealogy of net cultures. Rowman & Littlefield.

Abbate, J. (2017). What and where is the internet? (Re) defining internet histories. Internet Histories, 1(1-2), 8-14.

Bory, P. (2020). The internet myth: From the internet imaginary to network ideologies. University of Westminster Press.

Castells, M. (2001). The internet galaxy: Reflections on the internet, business, and society. Oxford University Press, USA.

De Bode, P., & Teszelszky, K. (2021). Collectiebeschrijving XS4ALL-homepages (1.0) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5914147

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. H. (2015). Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. University of Chicago Press.

Kennedy, B. L., & Thornberg, R. (2018). Deduction, induction, and abduction. In U. Flick (Ed.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative data collection (pp. 49-64). Sage.

Natale, S., & Balbi, G. (2014). Media and the imaginary in history: The role of the fantastic in different stages of media change. Media History, 20(2), 203-218.

Nevejan, C., & Badenoch, A. (2013). How Amsterdam invented the Internet: European networks of significance, 1980–1995. In A. Gerard & O. Ruth (Eds.), Hacking Europe: From computer cultures to demoscenes (pp. 189-217). London: Springer London.

Pinch, T. & Bijker, W. (2012). The social construction of facts and artefacts. In W. Bijker, et al. (Eds.),The social construction of technological systems. (pp. 11-44).

Rheingold, H. (1995) Virtual community and civic life in Amsterdam. Rheingold’s tomorrow. https://people.well.com/user/hlr/tomorrow/amsterdam.html

Schiølin, K. (2020). Revolutionary dreams: Future essentialism and the sociotechnical imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark. Social Studies of Science, 50(4), 542-566.

Turner, F. (2017). Can we write a cultural history of the Internet? If so, how? Internet Histories, 1(1-2), 39-46.

Wodak, R. (2001). What cda is about – a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments. In R, Wodak & M. Meyers (eds). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 1-13). SAGE Publications.

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Notes and comments

* Thanks to Anya Shchetvina for giving the suggestions of Paolo Bory book, an excellent addition and great study exemplifying the argument!