Bright Networks and Dark Spaces: Implications of Manuel Castells for Higher Education

Academe, May/Jun 2004 by Marginson, Simon

Higher education has always had a contradictory social potential. Education systems provide the cultural codes guarding access to the elite segments of social networks. Education can, however, also be used to broaden inclusiveness, to render human society more horizontal and universal, creating public as well as market goods. The message of The Information Age is that networking has an inherent tendency to create a vertical digital divide, and that only broad-based democratic politics can counter that tendency. Yet conventional politics is in an ongoing state of crisis and does not provide a solution. For Castells, the key democratic potential lies in what he calls "project identity," movements that are committed to collective self-transformation, such as feminism and environmentalism. If so, the relationship between these movements and higher education becomes central to its capacity to create public goods.

Simon Marginson is professor of education at Monash University, Australia, and director of the Monash Centre for Research in International Education. He is also editor of the Australian Journal of Education.