This article looks at how the discourse of an emerging information society in 1990s Estonia both rejected and depended on expertise from the Soviet Period. It traces the influence 1960s-trained cyberneticians and sociologists had on expanding the concept of an information society in the 1990s, to encompass issues such as regional inequality, national culture, and poverty, instead of focusing solely on hardware purchasing and telecomms liberalization. This process was both enabled and occluded through "rupture-talk,” a rhetorical strategy emphasizing the novelty of digital infrastructure development compared to the Soviet past. The article argues that a shared belief in the power of information processing for both empowering and containing civil society enabled ideologically divergent actors to work together. The resulting vision diverged from neoliberal visions of information societies in hitherto unacknowledged ways.

中文翻译：

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空白的板岩状态：爱沙尼亚信息社会与1990年代的新颖政治

本文探讨了1990年代爱沙尼亚新兴信息社会的话语如何既排斥又依赖苏联时期的专门知识。它追溯了1960年代训练有素的网络专家和社会学家对1990年代信息社会概念的扩展所产生的影响，其中涉及区域不平等，民族文化和贫困等问题，而不仅仅是关注硬件购买和电信自由化。这一过程通过“断言”得以实现和封闭，“断言”是强调与苏维埃过去相比数字基础设施发展的新颖性的一种夸夸其谈的策略，文章认为，对于增强和遏制民间社会的信息处理能力有着共同的信念。使思想上分歧的参与者能够一起工作。