Loss of Communication in the Information Age -- Kommunikationsverlust im Informationszeitalter

From November 26 to 28,1998,the Austrian Academy of Sciences held,within the framework of the Austrian EU Presidency,the international conference on “Loss of Communication in the Information Age ”,attracting academics from 11 countries.The present collective volume documents the lectures presented within the framework of this conference and the final declaration jointly prepared by the participants. The rapid technological progress is leading to ever- increasing demands of the individual ’s communication skills,and only a minority of citizens are capable of using the technological innovations and drawing benefit from the vast range of information available in the global village in order to apply it to their own way of life. On the basis of this problem, the conference devoted its discussions to a wide range of topics involving modern communications problems; from “everyday communications” in the information society and from functional illiteracy in OECD countries through questions of literality and orality in a multicultural environment, the development of critical literality and intercultural communications skills and the importance of modern technologies for this purpose, up to problems of linguistic minorities in the modern information society, the Ebonics controversy in the USA and questions of visual communication and graphemics/graphology.