Diverging Projections of Reality

Abstract

A shared communicative space has generally been assumed to provide a basis for democratic deliberation processes wherein problems are defined, while competing political actors advocate for their preferred policies. In a mass media environment, grounds for politically motivated frame competition therefore arose primarily over limited opportunities for public attention. With ongoing processes of media fragmentation, modes of frame competition have increasingly shifted to the sites of journalistic production: media attain the means of projecting realities in tune with their audiences’ preferences, leading to a segmented perception of reality. Routinely, such processes are conceptualized as hermetically sealed echo chambers or filter bubbles. But such concepts do not provide us with a coherent analytical framework, nor do they account for overlap or feedback between competing projections of reality. This paper introduces a model through which frame competition via different modes of journalistic production might be systematically observed. It consists of four distinct levels by which (1) sets of information emerge within a sphere of accessible discourse, (2) distinct selection processes of particular frames occur, (3) potentially overlapping projections of reality are formed and (4) feed back into the spectrum of available discourse.

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