Digital Diploma Mills, Part 1: The Automation of Higher Education
David F. Noble · October · 1998
The art world is not the only site feeling the pressure to go online. We are urged now to shop, to consume the news, to do research, or to take classes via the Internet. For those of us with anything to do with the university, particularly in the fields concerned with the visual arts, the pressure to mount courses on Web sites is growing with startling rapidity. The university administrators urging faculties to comply with their desire to produce online material (which they, in their total complicity with the corporate interests in educational software, invariably call product) refer to the Net as a new of expression. For those of us who think that the computer-even enlarged to the scale of the Internet-is no more a form of expression than a typewriter, this propaganda for the Net has come to seem highly suspicious. It is for this reason that the editors of October have read David Noble's two essays-posted as they were on the Net-with deep fascination. The urgency of the issues they raise has led us to publish them here in order that our readers might be alerted to the problems of coercion and copyright infringement now being generated in the interests of the information revolution. For Professor Noble's generous permission to reprint these essays, October expresses its gratitude.