New Technologies, Old Universities and Democratic Societies

Abstract

A broad range of literature has been published recently about the worth of the new information technology to business and industry. Indeed, this technology has grown sufficiently large to merit its own slogans, the most recent being ‘the videotext revolution’, and a computer was selected ‘Machine of the Year’ in 1982 by Time Magazine (Scholl, 1982). Yet the implications of this new technology for democratic societies have largely been overlooked. I therefore intend to address the question of the political impact of the computer technology, not from the vantage point of contending commercial proprietary interests, or to make technical distinctions between delivery systems, but rather primarily from the standpoint of university structures. More exactly, what its effects are on scholars and citizens as a result of developments that come under a variety of labels-from electronic data to information technology, broadcast teletext to interactive videotext — but which add up to the same thing: the dissemination of information from senders to receivers in formats without benefit of (or supplemental to) hard copy, that is, the printed word.