Speed and the Unsettling of Knowledge in the Digital University

Abstract

This chapter considers how the nature of academic knowledge is inevitably being transformed in the digital university when the latter’s modes of production and exchange employ technologies that transmit data, through fibre optics, at the speed of light. Whilst remaining aware of arguments that draw too easily on notions of technological determinism, the chapter will draw on Virilio’s analysis of the relation between speed and power to differentiate the changing nature and uses of knowledge in digital environments from those familiar to us from print-based culture and some of the implications of this digital transformation and changed temporality for academic authority, approaches to academic writing, and traditional ways of practising.