Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [24]
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Emerging Network Culture
Recent history is no less important for higher education than more or less ancient history. Since the 1960s, the university and the broader society and culture have been moving in opposite directions. We have seen that contentious conflicts created by developments ranging from campus unrest in the sixties and the culture wars of the seventies to the identity politics and political correctness of the nineties raised barriers between colleges and universities and the world at large. At the same time, faculties and the student body were becoming more internally fragmented. As these divisions were growing and deepening, the world was becoming more interconnected. While aspects of recent social and cultural changes have been described as the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial economy or as the shift from modernism to postmodernism, what is occurring is best understood as the appearance of network culture.
Network culture is characterized by the emergence of a new information and communications infrastructure that has been developing since the 1970s. Most of these technologies were originally created with government support and intended for military purposes, but they quickly became commercialized and spread throughout society. The evolution of this infrastructure has been very rapid and continues at an accelerating rate. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, mainframe computers gave way to personal computers, which were then linked to form networks. With the recent introduction of handheld devices and wireless technology, these networks have become ubiquitous and their impact has increased exponentially.
The creation of the Internet and the World Wide Web has been the most significant development in network culture to date. In the early days of its emergence, the rights to the use of Internet technology were granted first to university and military contractors working on the project, and access was gradually extended more widely. By the early 1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) had established a network that enabled universities to communicate for purposes of research. Commercial networks started appearing at this time, but the NSF did not turn over control of the Internet to commercial interests until 1994. That same year saw another decisive development for network culture—the introduction of graphic interfaces and Web browsers like Mosaic, Netscape and eventually Internet Explorer, which made the World Wide Web much easier to use and created the prospect for completely unanticipated commercial applications. As these networks expanded, they were deregulated, and when the Internet was commercialized, companies quickly adapted. At this point, innovation shifted from the nonprofit to the for-profit sector; colleges and universities were left struggling to catch up and had to pay exorbitant prices for what they had helped to originate.
It is important to recognize that the Internet is actually a network of networks and the World Wide Web is a web of webs. The range of networks now connecting us includes, among others, media, financial, phone, military, terror and social networks. This constantly changing infrastructure has already transformed news and entertainment media, financial markets, military operations and the sociopolitical order, engineering a shift from the local to the global far beyond what most people imagined possible a decade ago. In coming years, emerging network culture will have an increasingly important impact on colleges and universities. If we are to appreciate the scope of the changes that need to be made in higher education, it is necessary to consider the conditions that have led to our current situation and then to examine the distinctive structure and operation of new global networks.
The collapse of the