I 1900-talets slutskede började man i Sverige, liksom på andra håll, diskutera huruvida samhället befann sig i en genomgripande omvandling där den industriella ordning som definierat moderniteten skulle bli ett minne blott. Ett av begreppen som cirkulerade och på många sätt karakteriserade det föreställda epokskiftet var ”kunskapssamhället”, en abstraktion som kom att attrahera såväl politiker som akademiker under seklets sista decennier.

I denna tvärvetenskapliga antologi undersöker en grupp forskare hur kunskapssamhället som idé gjordes till referenspunkt. Den skulle ge mening till nya samhällsvisioner som debatterades och iscensattes på vitt skilda arenor – alltifrån utbildningssektorn till institutioner för kommunikation och kultur.

Författarna bidrar med ny kunskap om det sena 1900- och tidiga 2000-talets samhällsutveckling och tankeströmningar. Boken ger även perspektiv på vår egen samtid vars framtid tycks mer oförutsägbar än någonsin.

Drawing on Herta Herzog’s most famous text, ‘On Borrowed Experience’ (1941), this chapter highlights Herzog’s choice of methods, challenges the alleged rift between so-called ‘critical’ and ‘administrative’ mass-communication research, and tracks Herzog’s work as an important complement to Lazarsfeld’s and Merton’s famous efforts during the same era. In comparison with these two communication researchers, Herzog had a more cognitive and behavioural approach, influencing not only academic research but also commercial, applied research - not least in the service of advertising and PR agencies. In addition, Herzog contributed a gender perspective, as her studies explicitly focused on the everyday lives of women and their respective media habits. Finally, this chapter broadly summarises the foundations of the so-called ‘uses and gratifications’ model, of which Herzog can be said to have been one of the crucial inventors. Important challenges and shortcomings of this research approach are also highlighted.

Linguistic Explorations of Societies (LES) is an interdisciplinary research project with scholars from the fields of political science, computer science, and computational linguistics. The overarching ambition of LES has been to contribute to the survey-based comparative scholarship by compiling and analyzing online text data within and between languages and countries. To this end, the project has developed an online semantic lexicon, which allows researchers to explore meanings and usages of words in online media across a substantial number of geo-coded languages. The lexicon covers data from approximately 140 language-country combinations and is, to our knowledge, the most extensive free research resource of its kind. Such a resource makes it possible to critically examine survey translations and identify discrepancies in order to modify and improve existing survey methodology, and its unique features further enable Internet researchers to study public debate online from a comparative perspective. In this article, we discuss the social scientific rationale for using online text data as a complement to survey data, and present the natural language processing-based methodology behind the lexicon including its underpinning theory and practical modeling. Finally, we engage in a critical reflection about the challenges of using online text data to gauge public opinion and political behavior across the world.