ABSTRACT

The rapid proliferation of global computer-based networks and the growing digitization of knowledge, which allows it to circulate in those global networks, unsettle the standard meanings of knowledge. This in turn weakens the effectiveness of conventional framings for understanding what we mean by knowledge. It makes legible the particularity of the supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘scientific’ categories through which formal institutions organize ‘their’ knowledge – knowledge that has been defined as the aims of these institutions.