Information literacy on the political agenda: An analysis of Estonian national strategic documents

Abstract

There is a controversy: while information literacy (IL) has been recognized to have a central role in operating efficiently in the information society, previous studies have noted that in the European political agenda, the actual wording of IL is rarely used. This study pays a close visit to 15 Estonian information policy–related national strategic documents from 1998 to 2014 to understand the emerging role of IL in these documents. Qualitative text analysis and critical discourse analysis are employed to analyse both explicit representations and implicit conceptualizations of IL, linked to social determinants, ideologies, and effects from the dominating discourse. Considering the different “faces” of IL (Bruce, 1997), one can see that while the dominant approach to IL is technologically oriented, few other concepts of IL can be detected. Discursively, the information society is defined through economic and technological fields, on the wave of technological determinism and neoliberalism, with some social equality.