The University in a Post-Industrial, Post-Digital, and Post-Pandemic World (Part II)
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By John Muthyala
Department of English, University of Southern Maine, May 2023#The essay does not represent any position by USM, the UMaine System, or anyone associated with them; the author writes on his own behalf. In Part 1, John Muthyala provided the institutional historical context for Maine’s public universities obtaining Unified Accreditation, highlighted concerns, pointed to current budgetary and enrollment challenges, and focused on the state’s diverse economies shaped by regional culture. In Part II, Muthyala explains the terms post-industrial, post-digital, and post-pandemic, comments on their relevance to our efforts to reimagine Maine public higher education, and offers suggestions for academic innovation. Please read Part I before or after reading Part II.
Let’s delve a little into the terms post-industrial, post-digital, and post-pandemic.
Post-Industrial
In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, sociologist Daniel Bell marks the shift from the industrial to postindustrial society thus:
1. “Economic sector: the change from a goods-producing to a service economy;
2. Occupational distribution: the pre-eminence of the professional and technical class;
3. Axial principle: the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formulation for the society;
4. Future orientation: the control of technology and technological assessment;
5. Decision-making: the creation of a new “intellectual technology.”[i]
In The Rise of the Networked Society (Vol.1) Manuel Castells fine-tunes Dell’s analysis: manufacturing is not displaced by services but realigned within a global economy; the privileged role of managers and technicians and the increase for low-skilled work depend on specific changes linking the agricultural, the industrial, and the post-industrial in diverse places in the world; unique to post-industrial society is not the rise of information but its role in permeating economic and social activity through networks and global circuits.[ii]
In The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler argues that the new information economy, in key respects, enhances liberalism and democracy, because it enables individuals to bypass established hierarchies to access and generate knowledge; in the post-industrial economy, markets are transformed by non-market impulses, culture, and social practice.[iii]
Bell, Castells, and Benkler’s observations gain contemporary urgency in The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships, the Institute for the Future, which notes, “Robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), and Cloud Computing. . . enabled by significant advances in software, will underpin the formation of new human-machine partnerships.” Their combined impact would lead to a condition where “technology will work as an extension of people, helping orchestrate, manage, and automate many day to day activities.”[iv] This leads to our post-digital condition.
Post-Digital
The term “post-digital” describes how our social lives are increasingly becoming mediated by digital tools and networks; in moving past the digital revolution’s early phase of disruption, the post-digital highlights the scale and depth of digitalia’s impact in all spheres of human activity. “The tendrils of digital technology,” Kim Cascone points out, “have in some way touched everyone.”[i] As Scott Contreras-Koterbay and Łukasz Mirocha observe, the “postdigital is therefore interested in assessing these consequences by locating, conceptualizing and critically examining manifestations of the postdigital condition in society, culture, economy etc.”[ii]
Post-digital, argues Florian Crammer, describes a “contemporary disenchantment with the digital information systems and media gadgets,” due to skepticism towards “techno-positivist innovation narratives.”[iii] Instead, the tendency is to accept and thrive in the “messy state of media, arts and design after their digitization.”[iv] There is now “a deliberate choice of renouncing electronic technology, thereby calling into question the common assumption that computers, as meta-machines, represent obvious technological progress.”[v] Carmer notes that checking out flea markets for vinyl records while listening to music on iPods, or using oil paint and photoshopping with latest applications shows a post-digital sensibility, one that seeks “the technology most suitable to the job, rather than automatically ‘defaulting’ to the latest ‘new’ media.”[vi]
What Cramer points to in post-digital culture can be viewed as a continuation of trends Henry Jenkins describes in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, which foregrounds the overlap of “media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence” that facilitates “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kind of entertainment experiences they want.”[vii] It is a continuation of trends Rita Raley examines in Tactical Media, which highlights “tactical media” or artistic and popular “forms of intervention, dissent, and resistance” purposed towards “the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible. . . . Tactical media operates in the field of the symbolic, the site of power in the postindustrial society.”[viii]
A post-digital sensibility mixes traditional or old media with new media, not to find a harmonious balance between them but to let the work, the job, the goal shape the use of mixed media. Its focus is on what works best for a specific act or rhetorical purpose; it critiques normalizing technological disruption as an innovative social norm, by examining why, where, and how it occurs, and the corporate, institutional, and governmental institutions that grant it legitimacy.
Post-Digital Phenomenon: AI + ChatGPT
The release in 2022 of ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer), an AI-powered chatbot, by Open AI has elicited acceptance, shock, skepticism, and rejection not only in business industries but in academia, because of ChatGPT’s immense capabilities: it mines billions of data bytes but does not retrieve the best or most relevant search result but generates content in real time. The chatbot learns, machine learns, that is, as it interacts with users; for instance, if it does not know something and the user inputs data, ChatGPT is able to ascertain if the new data point is relevant to its “intelligence,” the ability to deep learn from databases to assess an appropriate response. The more the user inputs, the more it learns intelligently as its algorithms quickly integrate new data with current data.
Digital Humanities scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum sees the rise of ChatGPT as a crisis moment as it becomes “fossil fuel for the coming textpocalypse,” because it marks a “debilitating amalgamation of human and machine authorship.”[i] It can potentially overwhelm the web with content produced through algorithmic protocols that manage feedback loops constantly generating new content. Its will to self-perpetuate can be understood not as an act of producing itself anew again and again but producing the new through repeated acts of data input, data mining, and deep learning. The boundaries between machine and human prose will become so porous that it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between human intent and machine intent. Unsurprisingly, then, Kirshenbaum observes, “our relationship to writing is about to change forever; it may not end well.”[ii]
In The State of AI in Maine, a report jointly released in January 2023 by the Roux Institute at Northeastern University and Northeastern University’s Institute for Experiential AI, Usama Fayyad, who directs the Institute for Experiential AI, observes that AI has a “global footprint,” because it is “already being used to diagnose illnesses, model protein structures, automate assembly lines, and predict stock prices.” In short, “AI represents a powerful evolution of computer technology that has profound economic and social consequences.”[iii] AI is the digital revolution accelerating change to such an extent that it is becoming part of daily life. AI is post-digital in the sense that its transformative impact is possible in societies where the digital has pervasive presence. Thus, Dx (digital transformation) becomes "a series of deep and coordinated culture, workforce, and technology shifts that enable new educational and operating models and transform an institution's operations, strategic directions, and value proposition."[iv]
As Dx diversifies its transformative energies into the twenty-first century, the event that dramatically upended all spheres of social, economic, political, and cultural activity was–and continues to be–the Covid pandemic, which took place in the post-industrial and post-digital moment of the present.
Post-Pandemic
In The Future of Industrialization in a Post-Pandemic World, issued by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (2021), these findings, among others, are immediately relevant to reimagining the university:
a) the pandemic has had an unprecedent global impact;
b) countries with strong industrial bases demonstrate robustness (withstand shock) and resilience (adapt to disruptions);
c) digitalization enables varied industry sectors to stabilize or recover from disruptions.
When evidence shows, per the report, that “countries with stronger manufacturing systems have weathered the economic crisis better than the rest,” it should disabuse us of the idea that “post-industrial” means moving beyond manufacturing and industrialization to a knowledge, information-driven economy, as if the latter is inherently superior to the former.[i] Such a view is not only ahistorical, but also fuzzy thinking. A global perspective brings into focus the North-South axis around which the historical development of industrialization and post-industrialization needs to be examined, because “the impact of the crisis has been highly heterogenous across all levels of analysis: regions, sectors, firms and workers.”[ii]
The report also underscores three “megatrends” that need attention, which are worth quoting in full:
“Digitalization and automation of industrial production, as technological innovation and the deployment of ADP technologies affect essentially all spheres of business development and deeply change the competitive advantages of firms and nations.
Global power shifts, especially the emergence of Asia as a dominant hub of global industrial production and China’s structural transformation towards a knowledge-driven, high-income economy, as these developments imply a major restructuring of trade flows and global value chains.
Greening of industrial production, as the need to reduce environmental footprints, and in particular to decarbonize economies, calls for radically different business models and systemic transformations with far-reaching effects on the positioning of DEIs in the world economy.”[iii]
Ten Takeaways
Extending these ideas of post-industrialization, post-digital, and post-pandemic, I am suggesting that we reimagine the university as the post-digital university, in which all forms and processes of knowledge and information production, distribution, assessment, archival, and retrieval are impacted in some form or fashion by digitalia, and across local, national, and global spaces. We can foreground (not to affirm or deny, but describe) a few features relevant to public higher education:
The connections among knowledge, technology, and economic activity are tightening, but they are also being realigned.
There is increased mobility of economic demand, labor, and work environments.
There is flexibility in work arrangements (a decrease in stable jobs and an increase in freelancing, adjuncting, and labor precarity).
Local economies are influenced by national and international economic fluctuations and disruptions, and vice versa.
A Do It Yourself (DIY) culture encourages and rewards self-paced learning in the networked commons.
The role of gatekeeping knowledge, establishing the authority of the expert, and vetting through peer review in closed communities—what the university has been doing for generations—can no longer be taken for granted.
Over their careers, people change jobs several times, training and testing for different kinds of work.
The digital revolution is impacting how we read, write, and communicate, and is transforming–not replacing with new modalities but mixing them–all forms of research, teaching, and scholarship.
The complex interplay between the natural world, built environments, and socio-cultural practices calls for renewed attention to global shifts in the environment, governance, public health, and liberal institutions.
Economic transformations are deeply intertwined with local, national, and global flows, even as diverse social, political, psychological, and cultural practices impact them unpredictably.
Digital Innovation in the University of Maine System
Having led the USM Digital Humanities Initiative over the last few years, my colleague Jan Piribeck, now retired, Department of Art, and I considered strategies to scale up the focus on the digital at our university. We consulted with Group Dimensions International, a firm specializing in focus group training, to gather information; our partnership, supported by the Maine Economic Improvement Fund, and its former coordinator, Terry Shehata, now director of Maine Space Grant Consortium, led to the publication of a report titled Research Innovation and Institutional Growth: Digital Humanities, USM, and the University of Maine System (RIIG), based on data collected in focus group sessions, which included representatives from the Portland metropolitan region’s business, industry, government, and non-profit sectors.
The report’s main findings are as follows:
· The impact of IT on operations is significant and expanding
· A more skilled, analytic workforce is needed across sectors
· The New Workplace needs broad and soft skills
· Leaders find new recruits through networks
· Humanities graduates must demonstrate digital literacy
These skill sets are necessary:
From Market Readiness to World Readiness
As may be evident by now, as a humanities scholar, I am not backing away from making higher education relevant to the state’s economic needs. By the same token, I am arguing for a different model to conceive of the public university’s mission, one calibrated to accord with the undeniable realities of the uneven, unpredictable, networked and digitally saturated spheres of economic and political activity. Adopting the universities-are-engines-of-economic-growth model can lead institutions down rabbit holes of innovation, as Matthew Wisnioski and Lee Vinsel persuasively show in “The Innovation Myth.”[i]
However, eschewing this model does not mean affirming the opposite view that the university should remain above the fray of economic upheavals and societal transformations, which does little to address the harsh reality faced by millions of students, parents, and others: 1.56 trillion dollars of student debt, which surpasses total credit card debt by 521 billion dollars.[ii]
In Maine, academic innovation designed to primarily serve market needs will lead to graduating students skilled in Business, Health, STEM, and Data Science without “the knowledge necessary for deliberation, reasoned arguments, and social action,” which undermines “higher education as an institution of civic culture whose purpose is to educate students for active and critical citizenship,” as Henry Giroux perceptively notes in “Selling Out Higher Education.”[iii]
If the post-industrial society rewards entrepreneurialism and constant updating of skills, its corollary logic in the university, argues Gerard Delanty in “Ideologies of the Knowledge Society and the Cultural Contradictions of Higher Education,” leads to “greater managerial power, structural centralization, increased student intake, the casualization of labor and the elimination of efficiency.”[iv] Close to 80% of faculty were tenured or on tenure track in 1969,[v] but per figures in 2016, 73% of faculty are adjuncts “with insecure, unsupported positions with little job security and few protections for academic freedom.”[vi] In The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020-21, the AAUP’s finds, “In fall 2019, 63.0 percent of faculty members were on contingent appointments; 20.0 percent were full-time contingent faculty members and 42.9 percent were part-time contingent faculty members. Only 26.5 percent of faculty members were tenured and 10.5 percent were on tenure track.”[vii]
The blurring of vocational education and higher education to spur student enrollments often leads to widening, not shortening, the disparities in wealth, access, and equality. Scholarship and teaching risk becoming assessed by external principles of efficiency and market relevance. Moreover, governance in the university of post-industrial society turns administrators into business leaders and faculty into subjects for effective management by a slew of technocrats and professionals.[viii]
These caveats are important because they can help us respond carefully to the demands of post-industrial society, while simultaneously implementing policies that affirm higher education as a public good.
The post-industrial, post-digital, post-pandemic university can serve the public good by nourishing, not relinquishing, its ability to support and question the market while reimagining and creating alternate economic and social futures.
Such an approach can move us to a bolder, more honest, economically grounded, and market-sensitive mission: in the words of Christopher Newfield, “Admit the university no longer offers students direct entrance to a prosperous middle class, and has a new and broader public purpose,”[ix] because, as Cathy Davidson astutely contends in The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, “The goal of higher education is greater than workforce readiness. It’s world readiness.”[x]
From the Editors:
The University in a Post-Industrial, Post-Digital, and Post-Pandemic World, Parts I and II enact the mission of Maine Digital Collaborative (MDC): develop public conversations about public matters in the digital public commons. MDC invites people across the education, business, and non-profit sectors within and beyond Maine, and, indeed, anyone with a desire to work hard at writing, researching, and creating reliable, relevant content, to enrich the public commons by contributing to MDC. Contact the editors to discuss your proposal for MDC’s forum on the Futures of Public Higher Education.
# Parts of the essay are drawn from the introduction John Muthyala wrote for Research Innovation and Institutional Growth: Digital Humanities, USM, and the University of Maine System.
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I.Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1973. 14.
ii. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
III. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
iv. Institute for the Future and Dell Technologies, The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships, Palo Alto, CA: 2018, 3, 10.
v. Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24. 4 (2000): 12. Failure in music composition, writes Cascone, has become essential to sound production, in that “it is from the “failure” of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application error, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distorting, quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music” (13).
vi. Scott Contreras-Koterbay and Łukasz Mirocha, The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2016): 40.
vii. Florian Cramer, “What is ‘post-digital’”? APRJA 3. 1 (2014): 12.
viii. Cramer, “What is ‘post-digital?’” 17.
ix. Cramer, “What is ‘post-digital’”? 11.
x. Cramer, “What is ‘post-digital’”? 21.
xi. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Proquest Ebook Central (New York: New York University Press, 2006): 2.
xii. Rita Raley, Tactical Media. Proquest Ebook Central (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): 6.
xiii. Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Prepare for the Textpocalypse.” theatlantic.com 8 Mar. 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-writing-language-models/673318/
xiv. Ibid.
xv. Usama Fayyad, “Foreword.” The State of AI in Maine. Roux Institute and Institute for Experiential AI, Northeastern University, Jan. 2023. The report identifies several Maine companies exploring AI use in forestry, seafood industry, marine science, healthcare, and veterinary science.
xvi. Educause Review, “Dx: Digital Transformation.” https://www.educause.edu/focus-areas-and-initiatives/digital-transformation
xvii. United Nations Industrial Development Organization, The Future of Industrialization in a Post-Pandemic World, 1 Dec. (2021): 40 https://www.unido.org/news/future-industrialization-post-pandemic-world-industrial-development-report-2022; also see McKinsey & Company, The Next Normal: Emerging Stronger From the Coronavirus Pandemic, 2022 https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leading-through-the-crisis
xviii. UN, The Future of Industrialization in a Post-Pandemic World, emphasis in original, 5.
xix. UN, The Future of Industrialization in a Post-Pandemic World, emphasis in original, 18-19.
xx. Research Innovation and Institutional Growth. USM Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/research-innovation-and-institutional-growth/1/
xxi. Matthew Wisnioski and Lee Vinsel, “The Campus Innovation Myth.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 11 June 2019 https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190611-vinsel
xxii. “A Look at the Shocking Student Loan Debt.” studentloanhero.com 4 Feb. 2019 https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/
xxiii. Henry Giroux, “Selling Out Higher Education.” Policy Futures in Education. 1. 1 (2003): 193.
xxiv. Gerard Delanty in “Ideologies of the Knowledge Society and the Cultural Contradictions of Higher Education,” Policy Futures in Education 1. 1 (2003): 75.
xxv. Caroline Fredickson, “There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts.” theatlantic.com 15 Sep. 2015 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/higher-education-college-adjunct-professor-salary/404461/
xvi. American Association of University Professors, “Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in US Higher Ed.” https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/10112018%20Data%20Snapshot%20Tenure.pdf
xxvii. AAUP, The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020-21, Key Findings, Reports and Publications https://www.aaup.org/report/annual-report-economic-status-profession-2020-21
xviii. Delanty, “Ideologies of the Knowledge Society,” 2003.
xix. Christopher Newfield, “What Are the Humanities For?” A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education. Ed. Gordon Hunter and Feisal G. Mohamed. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2016, 176.
xxx. Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education: How To Revolutionize the University To Prepare Students For A World In Flux. New York: Basic Books, 2017, 15.
