Framing in a Fractured Democracy: Impacts of Digital Technology on Ideology, Power and Cascading Network Activation

Abstract

With the maturation of social media as a form of communication and the decline in mainstream institutional journalism, scholars must reevaluate the processes through which information is produced, distributed, assimilated, and acted upon. We consider five important, new, digitally enabled “pump-valves” in the flow of socio-political information and frames: platforms, analytics, algorithms, ideological media, and rogue actors. We revise the cascading network activation model of frame activation and spread, developed before digital media’s rise. This new integrated model illuminates how these five features of digitalization affect relationships among elites, traditional media, and individuals, and suggests research on whether they flatten and democratize hierarchies of information control and power or entrench dominant structures.