An Industrial West? A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Newspapers Discourses about Technology over One Hundred and Ten Years (1830-1940)

Abstract

Recent work analyzing the social impact of technology in processes of globalization signals a shared Western voice in sustainability related discourses dating back twenty years (Fernández Fernández and Savcisens. However, many scholars propose the idea that, as a direct consequence of the Second Industrial Revolution, globalization processes can be traced back at least to the second half of the nineteenth century. Only a few decades later, nevertheless, two of the most divisive historic events ever in human history took place: the First and Second World Wars. In this article we seek to explore information behaviour during one hundred and ten years approximately (1830-1940), using multilingual historic newspapers as a proxy (Le Figaro, The New York Herald, El Imparcial, Neuer Hamburger Zeitung and La Stampa), to observe to what extent technology acted as a cohesive force across Western societies walking along these different historic happenings. Thus we filter our corpus with three key technological terms (telephone, gasoline, and iron) as an exploratory endeavour. Afterwards, we implement a mix-methods approach that combines quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. In our quantitative analysis, we use a five-step pipeline that includes Topic Modelling (Pachinko Allocation), translation of the topic words into English, Word Embeddings, Ward Hierarchical Clustering, and a directed graph. In our qualitative analysis, we firstly select randomly one newspaper per decade per outlet seeking to observe whether multilingual historical newspapers are comparable objects of analysis (i.e. is their format similar enough to implement meaningful discourse analysis?). Secondly, we also sample randomly a variety of articles containing our selected key terms in order to assess the social impact of technology using a close reading approach. Our quantitative data analysis reveals three main findings: firstly, we empirically detect a trend in information flattening coinciding with the peak of the Second Industrial Revolution (1890 and 1900), as well as a trend of information complexity during the following decades. Secondly, we observe more nuanced patterns of agreement during the Twentieth century, therefore showing how the social and political polarity during that time did not affect technological related discourses. Thirdly, we notice high rates of content similarity across our three selected key terms over our whole observational time, displaying almost identical wording. These findings resonate with our qualitative analysis, where we observe a certain degree of heterogeneity among both newspapers formatting and our selection of articles, yet very subtly. These outcomes make us speculate with the idea that it is possible to trace a shared Western voice in technological related discourses back to two hundred years ago, exposing the agency of technology as a trigger of cultural flattening in terms of information behaviour.