Diskurser om informationssamhället : Analys av några offentliga texter

• Main Author: Eliasson, Björn
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för utbildningsvetenskap 2005
• Subjects: Information society; Critical discourse analysis; Information technology; IT; Education; Pedagogik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-2387; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:91-7063-009-7

The interest of this thesis is how the information society will be expressed in some public texts. The focus is especially on how such concepts as learning, knowledge, identity and IT as a tool will be constructed discursively. In a social constructionist meaning the future will be created through communication and interaction between people. Some Swedish Government Official Reports (SGOR) and journals have been analyzed with critical discourse analysis. On a wide level four strong discourses will constitute the discourse order of the information society. These four are the discourses of the market economy, the discourse of globalisation, the discourse of individualisation and the discourse of IT. Further IT has been the cause to a “new” dynamic society that is “in advance”, under “change” and “refinement”. This society is at the same time global and local, which means “glocal”. It is populated by the “new” human who is a “nomad” who will have a great own responsibility to adapt to the “loose structures” of the new society. The individual will be held before the collective. IT will “deliver” and reinforce the human abilities. Knowledge has been a commodity, which can be bought and sold worldwide. Knowledge will grow old very fast and because of that we need access to “fast knowledge” “just-in-time”. To describe the qualities of IT the analysed texts use metaphors. The metaphor “ghost” will fulfil our wishes in an unexplained way, the metaphor “wings” is about freedom and the metaphor “lever” explains that our abilities will be enhanced, in this specific case our cognitive abilities. The analysed texts both confirm earlier pictures of the information society and develop them further. Three positions can be distinguished. The first of them is that the IT will be expressed as ”force of nature” which as a revolution will change our society. The second one is how the force in IT is expressed almost like science fiction stories. The texts tell about the future as it already was here. The third position says that the new society is full of paradoxes. The problems in the world, even those that have been caused by the technology, can and should be solved, not only with more technology, but with the same technology which have caused the problems. The discursive paradoxes, which will be highlighted in the results, make the development of IT to an unavoidable part of the social practice of the future. There are no choices or alternatives.