The ongoing structural changes of the university are under heated debate worldwide, including the Nordic countries. In scholarly discussion, however, there has been surprisingly little analysis and critical assessments of the ways the mainstream media especially represent the state and future of university for the general public. By focusing on the ways Finland's largest daily newspaper covered a specific plan to reform the Finnish university system during Spring 2007, this article explores who were given the right to define the university's contemporary state of affairs, name its problems and suggest solutions to them in the national print media's public arena. More specifically, the article is concerned with the kind of actor positions afforded to human sciences and humanist scholars in the media coverage.

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In this chapter, the contribution of new information and communication technologies to enhancing democracy at the local level is articulated as a practical and empirical question that pertains to the locally established patterns and practices of public communication. It is suggested that in order to realize the democratic potential inherent in ICTs, the compartmentalized, hierarchical and one-way practices of both administrative-political machinery and the mainstream media must be exposed and challenged through concrete action. The article draws upon a participatory action research project in which alternative, dialogical and citizen-oriented forms of web-mediated public communication were created and maintained in close collaboration with grass-roots civic actors and groups. In the experimental project, specific efforts were made to enable and encourage online encounters between those local stakeholders that rarely meet in the discursive public spaces of mainstream media.

Amidst the commercial hype that has come to surround the internet in recent years, there has been much excitement about the democratic promise of the net and a growing wave of various e-democracy projects. It is thought that the ICTs and the world wide web in particular will enable more direct forms of citizen participation, especially at the local level, foster reciprocal interaction between citizens and decision-makers and create new spaces for public discussion and debate. Despite the claims of interactivity, the agenda for most online democracy projects has been set and their purposes of communication defined by institutionalized and powerful actors. The disparity between the rhetoric and the reality of web-assisted democracy is bound to persist unless the compartmentalized and hierarchic practices of public communication are challenged both theoretically and in practice. This article suggests that in order to tap the democratic potential of the web, we need to address the question of genre. As genres offer the cultural interfaces through which people make sense of and use the web, like other media, bottom-up alternatives to dominant online genres are needed in order to create more citizen-oriented spaces of public communication on the web. By drawing upon an experimental project where academic research co-operated with local grassroots citizen groups and actively mediated interaction on the web across social boundaries and power hierarchies, the article aims to demonstrate the socio-cultural significance of civic web genres.

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