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Finland
and other Nordic countries in many ways belong to
the forerunners in the development of the so-called
information society. For the time being, the level
of development towards the information society has
mainly been measured by technological and
infrastructural qualities - the amount of computers
available, the coverage of wide band connections
etc. It looks like the substance side of the
equation has been largely forgotten. Information
still is, to a large extent, published and
distributed as books. Libraries, as well organized
archives of literature with well educated
personnel, can be even seen as one of the corner
stones of the information society. Especially so in
the Nordic countries, where the public library
system has traditionally been widely acknowledged
and respected. Currently, there is a serious
discussion going on about the future role,
strategies, and foci of public libraries: should
they stick to their traditional role, or should
they remodel their services toward portal-like
gateways to virtual archives.
One more
characteristic of Nordic culture should be
mentioned here, which is the high appreciation of
literary knowledge, accompanied with literacy rates
reaching towards 100 percent. All this put together
creates an interesting test bed for the case of
digital literature. The infrastructure is there,
the literary culture and literacy is there, and
public access to literature, both print and
digital, is well organized. Only one thing lacks,
which is the digital literature itself. The central
question in this paper is, why is it so -- does the
(almost) non-existence of digital literature in
countries where the circumstances seem to be as
close to the ideal as one can imagine seriously
undermine the belief in the digital literature in
general? Or is it rather, that too strong a
literary culture is foremost an obstacle for the
development of digital literature?
I will take a
closer look at projects carried on in Finland, in
order to promote digital literature (such as
lending ebook devices out from public libraries;
providing pupils with 'e-bags', publishing national
bestsellers in ebook format, establishing literary
fora in the Internet, etc.), and seek out what has
been learned from these experiments. Also, I will
take a look at similar projects in Sweden, Denmark
and Norway, which all share, by and large, the same
qualities of well-developed information society and
strong belief in literary knowledge. Through this
survey I'll try to find some tentative answers to
the questions if there is, indeed, a place for
literature in the information society, and if there
is, where is it, and how would that literature look
like.
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