Fear and loathing in the information age

Anthony Giddens (e.g., 1977, 1990) has argued that the society in which we live is increasingly the result of our own actions, both individually and collectively, a condition he refers to as social reflexivity. He counters the common assumption that as we acquire more and more knowledge of the world and build structures of society, we will gain control over our lives. Quite the contrary, we 'manufacture' uncertainties that give us more choices, diverse possibilities, less clarity about an appropriate action. Modern technologies such as the World Wide Web have contributed greatly to social reflexivity and I argue here that traditional models of education, emphasizing as they do inductive and deductive processes, are inadequate to the modern technological context. Using examples from research on students using the WWW, I propose that abductive reasoning is a more powerful mode for navigating the uncertainties of the Information Age and promoting a semiotic reflexivity.