I will start my thesis project with an analyse of current innovations in technology and new materials to find out what possible potential they may offer for new design solutions. The focus will be on inventions of disruptive technologies of the past and the present and how they change our way of life. An interesting point is to draw conclusions from how the consequences of these technological milestones impact our everyday life. An example is the influence of the internet (in the bigger and the smaller scale): it changed our way to purchase goods, to find a partner and to get e-services. In an experimental way I will build up scenarios of a possible future based on this technological knowledge. The hypothetical utopias and dystopias will evoke new questions and theories. In the research phase I will among others illustrate classical and modern utopias and dystopias. I will try to capture the spirit and the trends of both, visionary scientists and designer/architects/ar-tists to describe fears and hopes of the future. / Master / InSpace 2009

<p>Uppsatsen belyser olika händelser som finns beskrivna i tre olika dystopiska filmer från 2000-talet. Uppsatsen jämför händelser i filmerna med historiska och nutida händelser i vårt samhälle. Uppsatsen försöker även visa om filmerna visar trovärdiga framtidsscenarion.</p>

Uppsatsen belyser olika händelser som finns beskrivna i tre olika dystopiska filmer från 2000-talet. Uppsatsen jämför händelser i filmerna med historiska och nutida händelser i vårt samhälle. Uppsatsen försöker även visa om filmerna visar trovärdiga framtidsscenarion.

Syftet med den här uppsatsen var att analysera 73 dystopiska temaarbeten, skrivna av elever i årskurs 9 vårterminen 2012, och undersöka om man finner någon skillnad kvalitetsmässigt mellan kvinnliga och manliga elever och ta reda på vari dessa skillnader i så fall ligger, i hopp om att det ska ge en tydligare inblick i problematiken kring svenska elevers dalande studieresultat. Med hjälp av textanalys som kvalitativ bedömning anonymiserades uppsatserna, de fem delarna som arbetena bestod av bedömdes och sedan summerades slutligen bedömningen i tre kategorier: svaga, neutrala och starka uppsatser. Därefter delades de in dem efter åtta återkommande teman/genrer: Science Fiction, Natur-/miljökatastrofer, Zombies, Politiska, Corporate, Gudomliga, Postapokalypser och Epidemier/Pandemier. Uppsatserna delades sedan in efter kön och analyserades för att se vilka samband som kunde hittas mellan insatser/resultat och temaval och populärkultur/finkultur. Det jag fann var att pojkarna inte bara presterat bättre än i tidigare forskning, utan även bättre än flickorna i undersökningen – vad gäller toppskiktet. Bland de svaga uppsatserna var pojkarna i en större majoritet än vad tidigare forskning visat, dock ej på grund av kunskapsbrister, utan på grund av ofullständiga arbeten, något som stämmer väl in på dagens rådande ”antipluggkultur”.

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Today it is common to state that we are living in an information overloaded society. But there are many different definitions of what can be said to constitute Information Overload and there is a lack of substantial research on the subject. Conclusions in the available literature on Information Overload are often drawn on anecdotal evidence and carries a dramatized picture of the causes and effects of the phenomenon. With the tools of discursive analysis this two years master’s thesis explores how the phenomenon Information Overload is portrayed in six popular science books that deals with the subject: Alvin Toffler (1970) Future Shock, Orrin Klapp (1986) Overload and Boredom, Richard Wurman (1989) Information Anixety, Andrew Keen (2007) The cult of the amateur, Maggie Jackson (2008), Distracted and Nicholas Carr (2010) The Shallows. The result of the analysis shows that there is a common discourse of how the subject of Information Overload is represented, which stretches in and between the books intertextually. In this study that discourse is called the dystopian discourse of Information Overload. It is structured by a unified use of narratives, concepts, themes, metaphors and statements and by its separation from the opposite utopian discourse of Information Overload. In the final discussion the results of the analysis are compared to postmodern theory, a problematisation of the concept of distraction and to the Swedish government’s 2012 investigation of reading habits of young people in the country. The conclusion of the study is that the two binary discourses discovered in the analysis – the dystopian and the utopian – should be avoided in the debate and research on Information Overload. Instead the discussion should be influenced by pluralism, complexity and awareness.

Dystopian fiction seeks to make conscious the faults of contemporary society through estrangement. Newspeak plays an important role in this estrangement, being a euphemistic and propagandistic language meant to distort the characters' perception of the fictional world. This type of language, however, has two different functions: one fictional and one didactical, where the latter seeks to emphasize the negative aspects of the fictional world to the reader. In this thesis I analyze the use of newspeak and language control as a means for social criticism in five Swedish dystopian novels published from the late 1950s through to the late 1970s. The novels analyzed are: Strålen (1958) by Ann Margret Dahlquist-Ljungberg, De sista (1962) by Arvid Rundberg, Elektra. Kvinna år 2070 (1967) by Ivar Lo-Johansson, Klotjorden (1970) by Kerstin Strandberg, and Järnblommorna (1979) by Jenny Berthelius. Apart from newspeak and language control I also examine the use of obsolete language and literary onomastics. Additionally, the thesis contains a smaller bibliography of Swedish utopian and dystopian novels published from 1950 to 1979. Language plays a central role in the novels analyzed: they contain different forms of newspeak and whilst these languages only figurate sporadically, their function is clearly didactic and meant for social criticism. Language control on the other hand, is a common theme that is often used to accentuate a totalitarian threat towards society. Most of the novels, however, primarily deal with obsolete language. It is the lost and forgotten that produces anxiety. This type of language emphasizes a loss of normative values that makes the reader question the fictional society as well as their own.