1450 by Johan Gutenburg! (65)Admittedly Harnad focuses for the most part on transformations to scholarly communication so perhaps we need to narrow our focus. But even here the notion that the speed up of scholarly discourse through scholarly skywriting will have some sort of positive transformative effect on the scholarly process or our thinking is a little hard to swallow. In the first place, the claims are probably overstated. We can get a clearer picture of this when we consider the possibility that the greatest intellectual and cognitive transformation than any academic undergoes is the Ph.D. process which requires the student to read hundreds of often boring, paper bound books and journal articles. Scholarly skywriting simply has nothing on the growth in intellectual maturity, the changes in thinking, and perhaps the ossification of thinking habits, that graduate programs have managed now for centuries as a routine part of the doctoral curriculum. It would take a good deal of empirical evidence to convince me that the new information technologies will have an equal or greater impact than this age old intellectual process.In the second place, there are more powerful structural factors influencing the uses to which IT is being put. For example, IT is unlikely to even touch the basic structures of the scholarly enterprise like the "publish or perish "syndrome that makes "communicating" to students or the general public a secondary concern - perhaps even a positive annoyance - to many academics. In this context, the potential of IT is likely to result in more pressure to remain current and more incentive to spend long nights in front of the CRT.Nor are these changes likely to loosen that other great structural imperative, the financial crises, that most institutions face. As sad as it is, we will likely not see a relaxation of the administrative push to work more, teach greater numbers, sleep less, and cut cut cut. In fact, if we were...
