Resumen de Cultural citizenship, education and media literacy on the imagined european north-south axis: Finland and Portugal in context
Finland and Portugal are both peripheral European countries, at the fringes of the European Union. This papersets out to discuss and compare some of the ways Portuguese and Finnish citizens are construed through present–daymedia literacy, be these distinctions historical and geographical, cultural, technological, educational or even ethical bycharacter.The idea of education (“Bildung”) as a stronghold of civilization used to lean on the concept of a nation-statethat is constituted by the citizens of this nation–state. But nowadays citizens are being overruled by the technologicalchanges and contemporary university students, then, may be seen as representing a positive paradigm shift fromcitizens of a specific nation–state to cosmopolites of a global civilization. The processes of construing and producingknowledge have been radically transformed by the information technologies: the open access approach makes itpossible to shift the traditional classroom learning almost entirely to on line work. “In five years, the best lectureswill be found on the internet free of charge, lectures that are better than in any universities”, predicted Bill Gatessome time ago in Techonomy Conference. Future citizens need to solve complex, ill-defined problems and learningbecomes increasingly a combination of face-to-face instruction with computer-mediated learning environments.But when some of the traditional values and practices of pursuing knowledge are nowadays rapidly being discarded,they are often being replaced by market–state doctrines of education and of humanity, thus producing identities ofentrepreneurship, often unwilling to participate in enhancing general social welfare.
