We hear about the wonders of the coming digital age, and also about its terrors. It could intensify the totalizing side of modernization at the expense of its critical side. The digital age has great potential for panoptic control and productivist consumerism. Its expansion and its flattening of freedom and autonomy.
In Assemblage Sanford Kwinter published a cautionary 'performance' about what we may be losing, and urges us to resist the wiring of the world. We must create "strong alternative cultures" that can resist "the sleazy short-term seductions of gadgetry." We need "alternative, off-line forms of culture and attention" that sound a lot like traditional university ideals.
Kwinter's enclave strategy is meant to maintain openness in the face of what he sees as the forces of occlusion. Could we need ( as well? also, more?) a new hyper-literacy?
Even within the university? Especially within the university?