From the Textual to the Digital University

The aim of this talk is to propose a new way of approaching the question “What is the relation between university and technology?” Since the question is very general, it needs some specification, hence we chose to follow the textual technologies as the main entry point. We will try to understand the relation between technologies of the text and the university by looking at the very beginnings of this relation, which was forged in the 12th century, according to Ivan Illich. According to the German New Media School, the place of the text in the university has been taken to be secondary to its media according to (Kittler 2004) and (Friesen & Cressman 2010) because the form of the media is seen as more important than the actual content. Hence the university conceptualised as a media system would entail that a different university emerges every time the media changes, for example we should have a university of the illuminated medieval manuscripts, a university of the printing press, and nowadays a university of the computers. However we think that the media theorists are missing an important feature of the university, namely how it approaches the text in the course of the pedagogical moments of the lecture and the seminar. These gatherings around a text make the university teaching specific and not the media employed. Drawing from the work of Illich centred on the 12th century European manuscript culture, we aim to show how technologies of the text and the pedagogical forms of the university are co-constitutive. Only by acknowledging the centrality of the text on paper we can understand the university as a specific form of gathering where thinking together is made possible through the materiality of the text.status: publishe