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and distributed easily and cheaply. Just as iTunes has transformed the music industry, so Google’s digital library, Amazon’s Kindle, the iPad and enTourage Systems’s eDGe dual-screen multimedia reader are changing publishing in ways that will affect higher education. Indeed, these technologies have already spread to higher education—some colleges and universities are beginning to produce lectures and courses that can be downloaded through iTunes University or iUniversity. On the train, I have overheard students discussing podcasts of lectures they are listening to on their iPods, and once I even saw a person watching the video of a lecture on her iPhone.

Fifth, decentralized interactive networks make it possible for smaller players to have a bigger impact. Exchange no longer takes place merely between an influential center and a marginal periphery, but also among people and organizations across the network. Interactive networks can create disproportionate effects. One of the distinctive characteristics of networks and webs makes this possible. Networks are complex systems that do not follow a one-to-one linear logic. Each node (a node can be an individual user like a student or teacher, an institution, corporation, government agency or even a terror cell) in an interactive web is connected to other nodes and, by extension, to the whole network. Since these networks are interactive, relations are two-way and, thus, nonlinear. In linear systems, the effect of any individual or event is always proportionate to the cause—powerful and influential people have a major impact, and big events create big effects. In nonlinear systems, by contrast, events cycle and recycle through mutually reciprocal loops to create what is known as positive feedback. This process amplifies causal events in ways that generate completely disproportionate effects. Ordinary people can have a major impact and little events can create big effects. Popularizers of scientific and social scientific research have dubbed this phenomenon “the butterfly effect.” The most common example they use is a weather system in which a butterfly flapping its wings in the South Pacific triggers a thunderstorm in New York City.

The media and information networks that underlie today’s social, political, economic and educational systems work the same way. As information is cycled and recycled, its impact is amplified. In technical jargon that has entered the public lexicon, information spreads virally—the more widely it is distributed, the faster its rate of dissemination. This phenomenon can be most readily observed in Web 2.0, which provides the infrastructure for rapidly proliferating social networks like MySpace and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. YouTube, for example, generates the same number of hours of footage every six months that it took the combined major cable networks seventy years to produce. Flickr, which like YouTube allows videos to be uploaded, also includes a file of images that increases by four thousand every minute and links one million images to Google Earth every day. The reciprocity of relationships in nonlinear networks creates positive feedback loops that move systems and networks to the tipping point where seemingly minor players and inconsequential events create unexpected disruptions like runaway best sellers, fashion fads, financial bubbles, social upheaval, political revolution and intellectual and cultural trends. As educational institutions become connected in these new networks, the possibility of a realignment of influence and redistribution of financial, intellectual and cultural resources emerges.

Sixth, digital networks make different media fungible (i.e., one kind of data can be exchanged and substituted for another). When information is reduced to bits, different forms of data become interchangeable. More specifically, words, images, video and sound can be created, manipulated and integrated into a single product or work, which can then be transmitted and connected to one or more other works. This synthesis results in layered