The worldly space: the digital university in network time

This article considers the effect of information technology upon teaching, learning and research in the ‘digital university’. In less than a generation the university has become a business like any other. It does so in the determining context of neoliberal globalisation and the computer revolution. The university develops through what we may now see as a disastrous ‘category error’. The article argues that humans are analogue creatures who have constructed analogue worlds that they recognise in large measure, in nature. Digital logic is nowhere recognised in nature, and is ultimately alien to us. The university is the key institution for enabling us to understand who and what we are, yet it is being undermined through the suffusion of the market logic and the digital technologies that drive it from a past we look to less, to a present we dwell in more, and a future we are less able to shape.