Chapter 14: Abstracted Space: The World, The Net, and The Contemporary University

The title of this chapter suggests that what follows could verge on the inflated and perhaps even the pretentious. There is an implication that everything will be definitively explained. However, another reading is possible, an ironical one where the title is deliberately presented to provoke, since definitive explanations are problematic and dangerous. Thus in this chapter I am not attempting to prove anything, either conceptually or empirically. What I try to do is put forward an argument, which could turn out to be interesting and provocative. It is however not a totalizing argument, perhaps not even an entirely consistent one and it is certainly a partial one. Unlike the implication of the title, I am struck by the fact that since the contemporary moment is ephemeral and highly accelerated, no one can really know what any social reality will look like tomorrow let alone in the future beyond (http://pscw.unva.nl/SOCIOSITE/websoc/introE.html).