Introduction: The Information University

Abstract

Introduction to the Technology, Democracy, and Academic Labor Section: During the last decade of the millennium, we experienced a massive influx of new hardware, email, courseware, and websites into our daily lives and an accompanying onslaught of images and narratives depicting futuristic technological revolutions.  However, a narrow focus on technology serves to mask the reality that processes of informationalization of ‘education reduced to content delivery, assessment mandated through the quantification of information, students positioned as information receptacles, and teachers downgraded to information servers’ were set in motion long before the advent of the Internet.  As Marc Bousquet argues in our opening piece to this section, in many ways the future vision of an information university is already our lived reality.