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The Argumentative Potential of Media Discourses Using the Example of Various Messages on the Digital Economy and Society Index Subtopic (DESI)

The pandemic has highlighted the central role digital technology plays in building a sustainable and prosperous future. As a result, the European Commission has proposed a pathway to the Digital Decade, a concrete plan to achieve the digital transformation of our society and economy by 2030. One of the key documents on which the Commission intends to build an annual cooperation mechanism is a report on the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) to measure progress towards the 2030 goals, including key performance indicators. In this article, these documents, as well as media coverage of these issues, are considered a created discourse to encourage participation of stakeholders and the public. As Croatia is included in the Digital Economy and Society Index document, this article aims to examine how its subtopics are communicated in the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) 2021 – Croatia document and in texts on the most visited portals and on Twitter. The topic is approached from the perspective of text linguistics, i.e., the analysis of the text as a unit of communication and the analysis of discourse as the sum of linguistic realizations within the text in a given social context. Such an approach to text and discourse analysis is innovative, promotes media and communication literacy and serves as a stimulus for the development of language analysis in media in response to the spread of fake news and misinformation. The initial hypothesis of the paper is that the topic of digitalization of the economy and society is poorly represented in the media analyzed and that the topics represented are supportive, critical, and informative from the perspective of argumentative intent. This paper uses a text analysis method of the Social Digitisation Index 2021 document and a qualitative content analysis of media discourse and Twitter discussions on the same topics as listed in the document. The paper summarizes the results of this qualitative research and concludes that the public viewpoints on the topics from the aforementioned document are insufficiently discussed on the selected portals and social network.

argumentation, Digital Economy and Society Index, public opinion, media discourse, Twitter

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