The Mobile Valley - Innovation About Innovating - The Welfare of the Nation - The Local Information Society - The Power of Identity - The Finnish Model of the Information Society.

Finland is known worldwide as a laboratory of the information society. The Finnish model combines information technology know-how with welfare state structures where equality seems to prevail. Can we take this picture at face value, or is it too optimistic? In this book we approach the case of Finland from children's perspectives by exploring what ICTs (information and communication technology) and media they use, how they use them, and what their thoughts are concerning this use? How does media become a part of children's everyday lives? The book is based on a nationally representative child survey supplemented by interviews where eight- to ten-year old Finnish children have been the key informants.

First Published in 1989. There is still much concern over social problems. Invasion of privacy, computer crime, control of information, information inequity, and unemployment due to automation continue to be studied as their existence is no longer a matter of speculation. The emphasis of this book is less on the consequences of information technology than on understanding the nature of information societies.

Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innovation, have intensified an interest in the relationship between different contexts and multiple sites of learning across what is often termed as formal, non-formal and informal learning environments. The aim of this book is to trace learning and experience across multiple sites and contexts as a means to generate new knowledge about the borders and edges of different practices and the boundary crossings these entail in the learning lives of young people in times of dynamic societal, environmental, economic, and technological change. The empirical research discussed in this book has grown out of a Nordic network of researchers. The research initiatives in the Nordic countries tend to avoid the more spectacular debates over the future of the educational institutions that tend to dominate and obscure discussions on education in the knowledge society, and which look to models of informal learning, whether in the “learning communities” of workplaces and families or in the new socio-technical spaces of the Internet, as a source of alternative educational strategies. Rather, Nordic researchers more modestly ask whether it is possible to envisage new models of teaching and learning which take seriously both the responsibility to social justice and social wellbeing, which, at least rhetorically, underpinned a commitment to mass education of the 20th century, as well as to the radical challenges to traditional educational models offered by the new socio-technical spaces and practices of the 21st century.

What are we to make of the information society? Many prominent theorists have argued it to be the most profound and comprehensive transformation of economy, culture and politics since the rise of the industrial way of life in the 18th century. Some saw its arrival in a positive light, where the dreams of democracy, of ‘connectivity’ and ‘efficiency’ constituted a break with the old ways. But other thinkers viewed it more in terms of the recurrent nightmare of capitalism, where the processes of exploitation, commodification and alienation are given much freer rein than ever before. In this book Robert Hassan, a prominent theorist in new media and its effects, analyses and critically appraises these positions and forms them into a coherent narrative to illuminate the phenomenon. Surveying the works of major information society theorists from Daniel Bell to Nicholas Negroponte, and from Vincent Mosco to Manuel Castells, The Information Society is an invaluable resource for understanding the nature of the information society—as well as the meta-processes of neoliberal globalisation and the revolution in information technologies that made it possible.

There is a clear need for a systematic, integrative, and rigorous normative theory of the information society. In this book, Duff offers a prescriptive theory to help to guide the academic and policy communities as they debate the future shape of emerging post-industrial, information-based societies. He argues that information policy needs to become anchored in a left-liberal philosophy which foregrounds a feasible permutation of the core ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood. The information society, if it is to be worth having at all, cannot be allowed to be largely the outcome of the free play of market forces and technological determinism. The social structure, including the information economy, must be subjected to a regulatory axiological system as explicated by some leading proponents of social democracy. This text will be of interest to scholars and students at the cutting edge of information studies, journalism and media, computer science, sociology, politics, philosophy, management and law.

Welfare state models have for decades been the gold standard of welfare state research. Beyond Welfare State Models escapes the straightjacket of conventional welfare state models and challenges the existing literature in two ways. Firstly the contributors argue that the standard typologies have omitted important aspects of welfare state development. Secondly, the work develops and underlines the importance of a more fluid transnational conceptualisation. As this book shows, welfare states are not created in national isolation but are heavily influenced by transnational economic, political and cultural interdependencies. The authors illustrate these important points of criticism with their studies on the transnational history of social policy, religion and the welfare state, Nordic cooperation within the fields of social policy and marriage law, and the transnational contexts of national family policies. This fascinating work contributes to the understanding of the current changes of welfare states by discussing the relationship between globalized capitalism and social political regulations and by arguing that transnational transformations importantly take place within and between nation states.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Human Choice and Computers held in Pretoria, South Africa. The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication. The scope of the series includes: foundations of computer science; software theory and practice; education; computer applications in technology; communication systems; systems modeling and optimization; information systems; computers and society; computer systems technology; security and protection in information processing systems; artificial intelligence; and human-computer interaction. Proceedings and post-proceedings of refereed international conferences in computer science and interdisciplinary fields are featured. These results often precede journal publication and represent the most current research. The principal aim of the IFIP series is to encourage education and the dissemination and exchange of information about all aspects of computing.

This book studies how the knowledge society has created new conditions of marginalities while empowering people through new age connectivity.