“Blockchain May Automate Jobs Done by the Boss and AI Can Predict a Heart Attack” : Discourses of (Imaginary) Applications of New Technologies in Journalism

Abstract

This chapter explores how a shared understanding of the potential uses of new, abstract technologies is created in journalism. We analyse Finnish journalistic texts from 2015–2020 in which blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are introduced to the readers, conceptualized, and discussed. Drawing on the classic Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we discuss how journalism frames and reframes the salient attributes of these technologies especially in terms of their perceived usefulness and ease of use. Furthermore, through regarding these speculative meanings as reflections of the technological or algorithmic imaginary we look into the discourses through which their potential or imaginary applications are explained. This research is important because technologies do not enter the lives of people as concrete devices or programs, but initially as conceptual, imaginary, and affective entities.