It is hard to make comments on the contemporary world without simultaneously prospecting the future. These endeavors are entangled. Under strong momentary impressions, we may believe we are facing pressing issues, but what seems so important today may quietly disappear into oblivion. At best, it is possible to scan the likelihood of various unfoldings in tune with identified trends and in analogy with previous historical examples.

The difficulty of prospecting possible futures, however, should not immobilize anyone. Quite the contrary, if we don’t occupy this critical space, others will do it. The future is of everyone’s interest, and dealing with it is not an innocuous task. What is at stake in debating the future is a struggle in the present about the possible meaning of that future. In the end, what is at stake is what we want and fear. We are in the realm of politics.

My arguments are based on an increasingly common understanding that neoliberalism and the digital era are causing another round of deep changes in the spheres of production, circulation, and consumption of academic work. The very notion of “knowledge society” is a reflection of the desire of governmental, industrial, and financial elites to capture all knowledge production and to reduce it to the instrumental goals of the administration of flexible and net-based capitalist accumulation.

In order to achieve such a feat, the institution that needs to be radically transformed is the university, given its role in the hierarchical and authorized production of knowledge. The university, especially at the graduate level, where education and research clearly interrelate, is also the social space that provides the scientific, technological, and creative imagination that, in turn, becomes the breeding ground for innovations that give capitalist entrepreneurs monopolistic market niches. The relationships between some of the main digital era corporations, such as Google and Facebook, and top universities, venture capital, and startups in Silicon Valley are emblematic of what I write here.

The model now is such that in the sphere of knowledge production in the United States, Europe, Australia, and other countries, there is an increase in fine-tuning higher education, teaching, and research to meet the reproductive needs of neoliberal knowledge-intensive digital capitalism. In these key world areas, universities are becoming an appendix as well as a mirror to corporations. The university now needs to be a business like any other. The implications of this model are as follows: 1) The university has to be managed like a business. Productivism is but one aspect of this managerial approach; the transformation of academic routines into a complex accounting system is another. 2) The university needs to provide cadres perfectly adjusted to the economic system’s reproductive needs (“labor market conform”). Criticism, unless it is to technically improve the system, has a bad reputation. 3) The university needs to incubate technological innovation to consolidate and improve the economic power of key sectors. 4) Those disciplines, professors, and researchers that do not fit in this milieu are treated as excrescences or, at best, endangered species.

I am not very optimistic about the political scenario resulting from this Zeitgeist. Apparently, the Euro-American academic communities have not reacted in any effective way to it. Although many individual professors and researchers criticize the current situation, as a collectivity they tend to just adapt to it. I therefore fear for what may happen to academic freedom in these countries. I also fear for what may happen to academic creativity if higher education and advanced research are completely reduced to capitalist needs and corporate desiderata. They will certainly become further impoverished in their capacities to reflect on, and help produce, other social and human possibilities. Negative feedback can further reduce the university’s imaginative universe.

The Digital Era impacts academic production in different ways. It affects the classroom and the modes of sharing information with students. I will get back to this when I consider the sphere of consumption of academic work. For the moment, I will just mention plagiarism as one of the most important impacts of the digital era on academic production. Since the eighteenth century, when copyrights began as an offspring of a consolidated book industry, copying was controlled for economic and political reasons. The Digital Era made copying much easier, more perfect, and ubiquitous. Plagiarism thus became a real problem in the academic milieu closely related to our changing notion of authorship—a notion that is changing before our eyes often without our seeing it clearly.

In the sphere of distribution and circulation of scholarly work, there seems to be more space for immediate agency in the digital commons than used to be the case under academic print capitalism. David Beer talks about “the politics of circulation” as related to intellectual technologies, to the techniques of knowledge reproduction. There are good reasons to believe that when these techniques change, knowledge production, circulation, and consumption are highly impacted. “Open access,” for instance, points to a possible democratization of knowledge circulation. The proliferation of authors and platforms for dissemination of scholarly work, such as blogs and Facebook pages, is another source of change. All this is related to writing and publishing as a fundamental mode of sharing knowledge, building prestige and hierarchy, and making money, since books and journals, still the most prestigious academic media, are owned or materially produced by a certain kind of academico-capitalist entrepreneurs. So let me briefly consider the academic text as a commodity.

Scholarly texts have long been commodities in the form of books or of journal articles. Selling their copies is the business of publishing houses. It was for this reason that copyrights were invented. This was a way of having monopolist rights over authors’ capacities of creation and innovation. The Internet changes this scenario. If texts are free and authors control their circulation, how will publishers make money, and how will academic hierarchy/meritocracy be controlled? At the same time that the Internet destabilizes traditional publishers, corporations such as Google and Facebook show the future. As far as I see it, the scholarly text will be free in the future and publishers will be remunerated by the ads they manage to have on their portals. But what will happen to authors? Perhaps, depending on their status within the academic hierarchical systems and bargaining capacity, they will receive a percentage of the money made by the quantity of downloads of their texts. The vast majority, though, will remain what they are today: wage earners who are also paid to write.

Finally, what will happen with the consumption of academic work? Here, dramatic changes are also underway. In the past, to get a copy of an author’s work a reader would have to find the book or journal, while today one can quickly find PDF files on the Internet. The site Academia.edu promises that becoming a worldwide famous author is now a possibility open to anyone. Of course, this promise hides the linguistic problems ingrained in international academic communication dominated by the English language, as well as the screening and hierarchizing roles search engines and other institutional and geo-academic hierarchies have.

A challenge I want to highlight refers to the effects of the Internet and its social media on the attention span of students and readers. In the classroom professors already have to compete with cellphones and notebooks. Students supposedly have increasingly shorter attention spans with unpredictable results in pedagogy and knowledge transmission. The same is true with readers. Even older readers currently confess having problems reading an entire book in the age of Twitter. If, in the future, few people will be able to read books and long articles, there may be only two scenarios I can think of: Those who read books will be a minority even smaller than today, and they will either be 1) celebrated as the keepers of some kind of sophisticated and complex knowledge or weltanschauung, or 2) like in the cult book (Ray Bradbury) and movie (François Truffaut) Fahrenheit 451, they will be seen as dangerous subversives that need to be chased down. For those of us who read and write as persons born and educated before the Digital Era, I am not sure whether this is exactly an interesting conundrum.

 Gustavo Lins Ribeiro is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Brasilia.

Cite as: Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2014. “Impacts of the Digital Era on scholarly work,” FocaalBlog, July 23, www.focaalblog.com/2014/07/23/gustavo-lins-ribeiro-impacts-of-the-digital-era-on-scholarly-work.