The Changing Landscape of Global Academic Communication

By Nigel Thrift. It is fascinating to see how academic communication is changing around the world. A new generation of scholars is using online tools to grapple with issues of public concern. In the past, the communications choices were fairly simple. There were journal articles and books to reach other academics. There were the occasional professors on television, the various columnists in the print media, and, with a bit of luck and a lot of application, news articles about university work. But the times are changing. Many more channels mean that much more content is dispersed. As a result, the ability to broadcast academic opinion and information worldwide is much greater than before. Online communication is growing in many ways, each of them “worldwise” in their attention to building international constituencies. Read more...