Virtual(ly) Universities?

An Examination of Two Digitally Contextualised "Universities"

Abstract

This  paper  will  consider  how  the  traditional  liberal  university  and,  indeed,  civil  society  arefundamentally  changed  by  a  semantic  recasting  of  what  constitutes  'knowledge'  in  aninformation  age.  Specifically,  it  will  examine  two  relatively  recent  examples  of  digitallycontextualised university structures, the Universitas 21/ Thomson Learning joint venture andthe Malaysian Multimedia University (MMU) in the light of Jean Francois Lyotard's propheticwork on techno-science, performativity and global capital renewal.