ABSTRACT.This paper discusses the fundamental changes of the current shift from print to digital technologies, from an industrial one-way broadcast media regime to the radical interactivity of social media and user-generated creativity. It initially focuses on the work of Chartier, Bolter and Manovich to map the language of new media that signals a broader shift of symbolic representation to a global digital network. The paper explores the electronic text, the logic of free communication and its potential for the democratization of knowledge and education.Keywords: electronic textuality, new media, digital technologies, democratization of knowledgeOur current revolution is obviously more extensive then Gutenberg's. It modifies not only the technology for reproduction of the text, but even the materiality of the object that communicates the text to the readers. Until now, the printed book has been heir to the manuscript in its organization of leaves and pages [...] and its aids to reading (concordances, indices, tables). The substitution of screen for codex is a far more radical transformation because it changes methods of organization, structure, consultation, even the appearance of the written word.Roger Chartier (1995: 15), Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer.New media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning as such. Comparing and contrasting new media thus stand to offer a view of negotiability in itself- a view, that is, of the contested relations of force that determine the pathways by which new media may eventually become old hat.Lisa Gitelman (2006: 6), Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture.1. Electronic TextualityWriting seventeen long techno-years ago, Roger Chartier (1995) argued that the current shift from print to digital technology entails a change greater than the one from manuscript to print. This shift was a fundamental watershed in our culture that changed the topography, the shape and time of media - from an industrial one-way broadcast media regime to the radical interactivity of social media and user-generated creativity. The significance of this set of changes is not easily captured or understood and its knock-on effects or of economy and society required a rethinking of our most cherished institutions from the operations of government and its departments to scientific communication, scholarship and pedagogy. In particular, the network of knowledge institutions that grew up during the Enlightenment - the research university, the modern research library, learned societies, the laboratory, the museum - were transformed as the norms of peer review and governance became even more internally related to the scientific enterprise and the technical platform for scholarly communication enabled greater intensities of global collaboration and knowledge sharing.From the point where Chartier and others identified the contours of change scholars tried to understand how the computer began to restructure the economy of writing altering the cultural status of writing and the relationships of author to text, and author and text to reader. Jay Bolter (1991) approaching new digital media from the history of technical culture talked of writing space and remediation as a central concept to understand the new aesthetic and cultural principles of digital media, suggesting that new visual media refashion rather than rival earlier media such as perspective painting, photography, film, and television (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). George Landow (1994; 2005) examining text-based computing in the humanities and electronic literature used the notion of hypermedia to describe and analyze the epistemological passage from closed authorial systems to open hypertextual systems. Some like Michael Heim adopted the term virtual reality and tried to describe its metaphysical properties, drawing on the work of Heidegger. …

A relatively thinly populated country, with well developed means of communication, has a denser population than a more numerously populated country, with a badly developed means of communication; and in this sense the Northern States of the American Union, for instance, are more thickly populated than India (Karl Marx, Capital). (Poster 1990: 1).The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer 'Is it true? ' but 'What use is it? '... This creates the prospect for a vast market for competence in operational skills. (Lyotard 1984: 51).

In The Rise of Network Society, Castells (1996) argues that the almost instantaneous flow and exchange of information, and capital and cultural communication now characterize the global economy. These flows organize and shape both consumption and production, including education. The networks within which the flows occur themselves reflect and constitute distinctive cultures. Both they and the information they distribute are largely outside regulation by the nation state. The growth of a global economy in conjunction with the new telecommunications and computer networks that span the world has also profoundly reconfigured institutions fundamental to processes of governance and accountability in the modern state. State sovereignty, nation–based citizenship, the institutional apparatus in charge of regulating the economy, such as central banks and monetary policies – all of these institutions are being destabilized and even transformed as a result of globalization and the new technologies. Since control of education is a feature of state governance, this is a matter of state security and, for this reason, will not be left entirely in the purview of educationalists. While Castells (1996) does not believe it is the case, such characterizations hint at the idea of globalization as inevitable and progressive. Concepts such as education are problematic, however, in that they depend, in part, on how they are interpreted under modern technologically mediated conditions. And to the extent that technological change is proceeding beyond the capacity of many of society’s institutions to interpret and adjust, it is an inadequate philosophical move to attempt to explain education under one domain (e.g., within a government

The politics of difference emerges as the new desideratum for understanding the complex nature of oppression in education and the way in which multiple and contradictory subjectivities and identities are socially constructed at die intersections of race, gender, and class, among their configurations. (Peters, 1995, p. 55)

Education in many Western countries is being reformed. The paper examines the role of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in the neo-liberal reforms and their revenue gathering from students credits in a contradictory neo-liberal policy context.

(1997). Education and the ‘Asia ‐‐ Pacific’ Discourse. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 5-21.

The OECD asserts that the role of endogenous growth theory is a key input to research underlying technological processes that enhance productivity. Within neo-liberal accounts of governance there is a paradoxical explanation of the free self, firstly as one who exercises some type of choice, and secondly as a self constituted through the exercise of choice. Neo-liberalism, however, does not provide a robust account of self constitution. Foucault's notion of Governmentality therefore is advanced as a more adequate account of the political conditions of self constitution.

Recent research into Private Training Establishments (PTEs) in New Zealand reveals that conditions for teachers are less than adequate. PTEs are part of the wider strategy which has been termed by the Government ‘Skill New Zealand’ and which aims at the development in the workplace of a culture that recognises the importance of workplace training as an alternative to education in tertiary institutions. Skill New Zealand is promoted within the government's education policy epithet‐‐’seamless’ education where the notion of ‘tertiary’ has been stretched in an attempt to include PTEs and where all courses of study are to lead to national qualifications. The paper is an initial exploration into the working conditions of teachers in PTEs and the government's seamless education policy environment within which PTEs are located.

It is argued that, as a result of recent restructuring, the state in New Zealand has paradoxically become minimalized as well as more powerful and pervasive. This paper presents public sector restructuring as the policy context of the reforms and neo‐liberalism as the critique of state reason that has been used to explain the reduction of the state in terms of the numbers of people it employs and the scope of its direct control. Reforms to tertiary education are seen to follow the restructuring of the core public sector. Michel Foucault's (1991a) notion of governmentality, it is argued, is a powerful critique of neo‐liberalism through focusing on practices rather than theories of state. One element of the reforms to tertiary education ‐ the practices of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) ‐ is presented as a counter instance of neo‐liberalism. The account of the governmental practices of NZQA illustrate that neo‐liberalism is an inadequate account of state reason because it cannot explain the increasing power and pervasiveness of the state. The paper concludes that the practcies of management of tertiary educational institutions under these conditions are seen as a useful agenda for further research.

This paper begins with the assertion that the regime of ‘perpetual training” (Deleuze 1992) will become the new regime and system which now motivates and integrates education and industry in the western world. This notion is located in the national industry training strategy for New Zealand. The first section serves to provide the policy context, focusing on public sector restructuring and the significance of the Employment Contracts Act (1991). The industry training strategy is outlined and described in some detail within the main body of the paper. This strategy is explained in terms of the underlying human capital theory, in particular, with reference to a recent OECD survey of New Zealand's economy and in terms of general workplace reform. The paper then addresses the problems inherent in human capital theory and the way it legitimizes present Government policy in education and training. Human capital theory is the most influential economic theory of education, setting the framework of government policies since the early 1960s. The paper isolates two basic assumptions on which neo‐classical, and therefore also human capital theory depends. These assumptions are cast in universal and ahistorical terms. The first is the idea that the economy is an analytically separate realm of society that can be understood in terms of its own internal dynamics. The second key foundation is the assumption that individuals act rationally to maximize utilities. The paper argues that individuals are capable of acting irrationally or in pursuit of goals other than the maximization of utility, and that the economy is influenced by politics and culture, but the strategy of excluding these deviations from the rationality principle is justified wrongly by the effort to identify the core dynamics of an economy. Some comment is given towards the end of the paper about recent experience in the UK of the conceptual and empirical problems of the type that the authors consider are in need of research within New Zealand.