In this groundbreaking book, media and time theorist Robert Hassan looks at the effects of the nexus between neoliberal globalization and the information technology revolution upon the production and dissemination of knowledge in technologically advanced societies. This nexus has created what Hassan calls an «information ecology», an environment that affects the individual, culture and society in the same dialectical ways as the natural and built environment. Significantly, this information ecology generates its own temporality, that of «network time», a digitally compressed and accelerated time that has «sped up» society dramatically since the late 1970s. Network time has changed the mechanics and institutions of knowledge production in society to an unprecedented degree and extent. How we think, what we think, and what we consider to be «useful» and «legitimate» knowledge is changing in ways (and at a rate) that poses serious problems for mass culture and civil society.

The Author: Robert Hassan is Research Fellow in Media and Communications at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. The author of Media, Culture and the Network Society (2003), he has published widely in journals on media, time and information technologies and their relationships to culture and politics.