Viva la Nano-Revolución! A Semantic Analysis of the Spanish National Press

Abstract

This study analyses nanotechnologys anchoring and codification in the Spanish national press to determine the thematic contexts in which this technology has been discussed. Latent semantic analysis was applied to identify themes based on semantic clusters and their longitudinal evolution. This analysis was carried out on a corpus of more than 600 articles from the most prominent Spanish national newspapers and includes articles from 1997 to 2009. Findings indicate an overall positive coverage and dominant thematic clusters related to national policies, economic development and business opportunities. Surprisingly, controversies surrounding nanotechnology are present in the early years of coverage but have become marginal over time, in contradiction to a general trend that emerged from previous studies on media representations of new technologies. IntroductionNanotechnology has frequently been described in the media, by policymakers, and even by scientists, as the technology that will provide the catalyst for the next industrial revolution. Yet, such utopian scenarios are also often accompanied by dystopian predictions within the current discursive arena. In July 2004, for instance, ETC Group (which stands for Erosion, Technology and Concentration), a Canadian environmental group, successfully lobbied for the attention of Britains Prince Charles: soon after reading an ETC report on nanotechnology, His Majesty made a public statement on the risks of this new technology, and the mass media coverage of his view and the debate that followed brought nanotechnology to the * Electronic address: G.Veltri@uea.ac.uk 1

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