Modern Internet development and knowledge-based economy: Google Discourse Study

Staniszewski, Michal

10. term

Culture, Communication and Globalization. English

2010

2010-07-30

49 pages

The topic of my thesis touches two different but strictly related to each other problematic areas. In the first of them I try to highlight a huge dependence between modern business world and communication technologies – especially the Internet. IT revolution of the last decades has introduced new ways of contact with the client, internal data management and cooperation within the company. The knowledge seen as a key asset has led to the emergence of the whole information industry whose main goal is to organize information to maximize an efficiency from its usage. Google is an excellent example of such company – it is certainly one of the most popular ones, the biggest on the market as well as with the greatest range of different services. As a leader in its field it has the biggest influence on the direction in which this technology evolve and thus its analysis can tell as more about wider changes. The second question refers to the method that is applied. I try to investigate what mechanisms are involved to stabilize Google market position, how does it promote its own ideas about the development of the Web. The emphasis put on power relations leads to the use of a Critical Discourse Analysis approach as main theoretical framework. I have decided to analyse Google language, style of expression, promoted metaphors and products, as a carriers of the ideas and thus political statements within modern discourse about the Internet. Such a perspective helps to understand which aspects of the Information industry and consequently also the whole knowledge-based economy may be problematic and for what reasons.

Google ; knowledge-based economy ; Internet ; Discourse analysis

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