Hannu Nieminen

Digital divide and beyond: What do we know of Information and Communications Technology’s long-term social effects? Some uncomfortable questions:

Our daily lives have become so immersed in digital Information and Communications Technology that we rarely stop to think about it. We know much about the benefits brought by its recent developments, including the Internet with its numerous applications. At the same time, there is increasing concern that the economic emphasis linked to these technologies will widen the digital divide, potentially sharpening social inequalities in a global scale. However, it has come ever more clear that it is not technology as such that is the cause of the social problems with digital communications technology but the ways how it has been applied, reflecting unequal power relations in our societies. There are a number of disturbing questions concerning the long-term effects of the social and cultural deployment of Information and Communications Technology. Some of the questions we address in this article here are the following: Can digital Information and Communications Technology still be regulated nationally? How do we measure the effects of Information and Communications Technology on academic work? How should we think critically about big data? Has digital Information and Communications Technology improved our lives?

A Short History of the Epistemic Commons

Abstract The quest for more openness and publicity is seen as a continuation of the long historical development of the epistemic commons, which began in the Middle Ages and culminated in the legacy of the Enlightenment. The argument is that European modernity is fundamentally based on the assumption that knowledge and culture belong to the common domain and that the process of democratisation necessarily means removing restrictions on the epistemic commons. Over the last 30 years, this optimism has suff ered from two kinds of backlashes. Firstly, from the 1970s onwards, a policy of weakening and privatising public institutions has practically halted the expansion of the epistemic commons. Secondly, the other half of Europe, the CEE countries, did not benefi t from the same kind of democratic development after the Second World War as their Western counterparts did. Because there was no tradition of democratic public institutions, the critical intellectuals in the CEE countries were rather helpless in promoting the ideas of publicity and democratic citizenship. The diffi cult questions are as follows: What can the role of critical scholars in promoting the epistemic commons be today? How should we understand the legacy of the Enlightenment – without falling for nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s?

Finland: The Rise and Fall of a Democratic Subsidy Scheme

In recent decades the Finnish media landscape has undergone fundamental changes. As a result of digital convergence and the fragmentation of the advertising market, news journalism has increasingly been treated as one commodity (product) among others. The ideals of democratic public interest and social values traditionally associated with news journalism have lost ground to market values. The business of journalism is thus at a crossroads: The traditional revenue streams of publishing houses are drying up as print circulations are diminishing, and advertisers are searching for alternative marketing channels to newspapers. This development has seen traditional publishing houses resorting to drastic cuts in journalistic resources. Consequently, newspapers are looking for means of scrambling for survival as the convergence of media platforms is challenging the traditional habits of consuming media content.

Transformation of Newspapers’ Thematic Structure in the 20th Century: A Comparative Analysis of Estonia, Finland and Russia

Abstract This article focuses on the thematic structure and contextualisation of the future in the main daily newspapers of the three neighbouring countries of Finland, Estonia and Russia throughout the 20th century. We mapped the content of 2079 Finnish, 2242 Estonian and 1723 Russian daily newspaper articles. The Finnish Helsingin Sanomat concentrated on the issue of “state and legislation”; the second most common topic in the Finnish sample was economics, at about 20 percent of the articles, with the exception of the 1910s and 1930s. In Estonia we did not find any dominant topic during the 20th century; there were many different topics related to the agenda. Politics and governance and related issues were particularly dominant during the periods of independence. Economy-related issues were more or less dominant during the period of Soviet occupation. The topics of economics and human relations and values were dominant in the Russian Pravda throughout the 20th century. The analysis reveals that Finnish media were more diverse than Estonian and Russian, which displayed a lack of diversity especially during the Communist period.

A Radical Democratic Reform of Media Regulation in Response to Three Levels of Crisis

In the development of modern states, the media’s role has been fundamental, as the organisation of national interests was their central function. From this viewpoint, the media and its pivotal role in the construction of “imagined communities” can be compared with other major nation-building institutions, such as the education system, churches, national army and civil service. These can be characterised as epistemic institutions, creating and reproducing a form of knowledge that is centrally constructed around national concepts and symbols. When thinking how to revitalise democracy and create conditions for a new, transnational political agency, we have to address the ways and means by which the media are regulated today. If we accept the idea that informed and active citizenship is at the core of functioning democracy, we need to ask the role of the media in its production. The problem is that all criteria promoting and providing democratic citizenship are already stipulated in a number of international agreements and conventions as well as in national constitutions; what is missing is a binding global regulatory framework that would guarantee that they are not only formally adapted to national and international laws, but also enforced in practice.