New Challenges in the Age of “Industry 4.0”: Digital Rhetoric of the Government and News Media

Abstract

“Industry 4.0” and its own component “artificial intelligence” have been discussed in recent years. Industry 4.0 refers to the fourth industrial revolution. Governments, economists, managers, intellectuals, and consultants celebrate it because it promises economic growth. This process means that everything will change. Therefore, some critical thinkers, like Fuchs (2018) , are skeptical of Industry 4.0 due to technological unemployment and its structural crisis potential. In this context, in order to understand how Turkey deals with this issue, it has been discussed how the Ministry of Industry and Technology and the mainstream news media depict Industry 4.0 and artificial intelligence matters. This study tries to explore the dominant discourses on Industry 4.0 topic through the tweets of both the ministry as a public agency and the news media and aims to reveal the ideological approach concerning “Industry 4.0” by analyzing the dominant/mainstream discourses on Twitter. The frequency distribution of the relevant tweets, the tone of the tweets, and the main themes of tweets on “Industry 4.0” and “artificial intelligence” have been analyzed by the content analysis method. Thus, it has been revealed the discursive expressions of the Ministry of Industry and Technology as a governmental agency and the mainstream news media on Twitter and concluded that the dominant rhetoric intensifies on the notion of a technological revolution , transformation, and the positive consequences of AI in the various fields in human lives. Hence, it has been ignored the critical public debates on this matter.