At the heart of the movement in learning into virtual worlds, is the technology of the internet. This enables the virtual learners to move globally in search of information, and to communicate in a multi-variant manner about this information. The internet is an access point for virtual learning and the movement of markets in a connected society. This accelerated behavior, which is associated with a dispersed and disparate field of information; encourages ideals of ‘freedom of information’, and the idea of an immediate access to a plethora of resource. It could be said that, the student will be able to find more material for their projects, they will communicate more easily with like minded students, and they shall have more information with which to formulate coherent arguments. They will also be able to make better informed decisions, better life choices, they will be able to perform business and educational interaction more quickly and efficiently; the internet, it could be argued, liberates the agent from informational and communicational isolation. Some educational technologists will certainly be excited by such a prospect; yet on a baser, more immediate and material level, what will the immanent effects of the internet be on education?

The development of suppressed semiological systems of meaning and behaviour, such as minority religious groups, (e.g. voodoo, shamanism), heralds a movement into polytheism, as has been argued (cf. Cyberpunk chapter and the rave ). The dominance of phallocentrism may be curtailed through the lateral thought of cyberfeminism, (cf. Writing on Electronic Bodies chapter). Computer gaming will be allowed to proliferate, globalising the specific imaginations of software engineers (cf. Gaming the Future chapter). Rather than, and in contrast to, an accelerated and enhanced ‘progress’ into the ‘global village’; the internet marks a complex plane of interaction, whereby many values undergo involution and transvaluation, whilst others are strengthened (e.g. rapid economic exchanges). The internet simultaneously serves as a crossing point for these transformations and permutations into everyday life. In other words, it could be said that, as the electronic herd becomes familiar with the internet, and the facility becomes easier and cheaper to use; the language employed, and the type of interaction deployed, will be increasingly interspersed with the formulations of secret societies that have been hidden beneath the security systems and moral codes of human control throughout history. The new ‘inhuman’ control mechanisms of servers, gophers, ISDN lines and telecommunications networks; are not bound by traditions of morality or social convention. The resultant unmannered ‘release’ of diverse communicative elements through the escape from human control; is a vital part of the tangled coding mechanisms of late capitalism that the internet is an integral segment of, and it is a sign post to the type of learning that shall proceed beneath its canopy. In the electronic theatre of the internet and postmodern capitalism; teaching and learning practises are having to adapt fast if they are to survive. This chapter shall explore these survival techniques by underwriting technological educationalist narratives with post-structural critique.

The internet has been likened to the development of other public spaces for discussion that have escaped the rules and traditions of authority. For example, the coffee-houses of seventeenth century London, were unruly places where discussion could breach any subject, with a rhetorical zeal derived from the recent overthrow of the Crown and the Church. In these revolutionary spaces, identities were confused, and the lowest could briefly ‘commune’ with the highest in animated debate. Jürgen Habermas has identified the coffee-house as an important development in the history of discursive space unregulated by established authority. Facts and ‘the truth’ were subservient to gesticulation, and the rowdy enactment of opinion was unfettered by formal control. Brian A. Connery has noted that discussion groups on the internet often display a similar flavour by integrating a hybrid of oral and written culture, disseminating information without regulation or inquiry into its authenticity. Yet such discussion groups, which are often lacking in any real direction or purpose, often fall into nonsensical arenas for abusive ‘flaming’. Whilst not being entirely unentertaining, they do not last, and usually have to be deleted from one’s ‘mailing list’. The coffee-houses themselves came to be dominated by colourful characters demonstrating ‘rhetorical muscle’, and the coffee-house owners used them as the advertising for their establishments to generate crowds of approbation. Other coffee-houses selectively focused on certain aspects for discussion; for example, literary coteries, auctions, science, or information about stocks and investments. In so doing, the anarchic discursive space which defied authority became authoritarian, and certain types of information or the harbingers of that information came to dominate the coffee-house social scene in authoritative cliques.

It could be siad that the same is happening on the internet; but the muscularity of debate is not (literally) the force which is attempting to take over. The commercial interests which have a stake in the new technology, are determining a new conformity, which threatens to dominate the internet to the benefit of that which has been variously referred to as ‘the virtual class’. If the internet is to remain an exciting and diverse educational space, methodologies which act as entanglement strategies to the emergence of the virtual class are required so that students do not march blindly into systematically uncritical learning. The virtual class are the retinue of the internet. They accept the new technology across the board, and integrate it into the rituals of social homogenisation, post-Fordian production and economic bias towards the technologically enabled. The champions of the virtual class are involved with corporate identity production and big business; the mantra which they sing echoes with qualifications and narratives derived from a technologically progressive society. Whereas the cyberpunk chapter of this thesis was an amalgam of entanglement strategies to the virtual class in education; this chapter shall attempt to put forward strategies that are more specifically attuned to the internet, and the relationships that it is establishing in education with the emergence of new social formations (i.e. the techno-tribes). This post-structural analysis of narrative forms that specifically deals with the internet, requires that one narrative form in particular does not surround or dominate the complexity and variety of the others. The meta narrative approaches of a combinatory education system and government, shall, therefore, come in for particular attention. As shall the technologically progressive attitudes that are associated with economic interest in the social development of the internet. The vital learning of the internet lies in its retention as a singular and inventory artefact.

The United States Commission on Critical Infrastructure recently reported that the most potent threat to the status quo in the US, now rests in the computer networks that carry vital information of the economy, population, energy supplies, politics, law, etc. It was estimated that in 1996 the defence systems of the US government were breached approximately 200,000 times, leading to the proposition that the most powerful military force in the world cannot be challenged on the open field; but is vulnerable through the electronic circuits which regulate and control it. The solution that they proposed was to tighten the electronic security systems surrounding the most sensitive information, with the hope of making the work of the hackers impossible, and concomitantly the notion of subverting the conformity of the virtual class untenable. However, post-modern power (broadly defined in terms of control and regulation) is concentrated and guarded in cyberspace, and it will therefore always generate attention. The education of the next generation, with computers taking an ever more important place in the home and at school, cannot ignore the real desire to become a ‘virtual terrorist’ and to entangle the linearity of computer process with sufficient diversions and byways to make it interesting enough to integrate into a viable virtual culture.

The educational process of the internet is therefore not straightforward. The concept of linearity in this context involves the placement of already established systems, values and ways of working, onto as yet not understood or fully implemented systems. Linearity is a social, historical and conceptual schema that accepts and projects uncritical extensions of methodology into multi-relational fields of interest and interaction. Digital technology accelerates linearity through the binding of signification to the circulation of signs as Anthony Wilden has theorised in his, System and Structure, (1972). Yet at the same time, digital technology produces a profusion of systems, and the connectivity of many micro-linearities; this is in contrast to non-linearity, which adapts directly to stimulus and does not provide an explanatory basis for generalised thought. It is impossible to designate subjective learning (and in particular the type of learning that occurs on the internet) as being either linear or non-linear, since both are involved and necessary in the symbiosis of cybernetic conceptual reality. However, as cultural artefacts, the objects of learning in cyberspace do respond to the systematic but dispersive processes of ‘entanglement’ or virtual terrorism (the non-linearity of linearity). This process is effective in terms of its status as subjective learning about the multitude of cybernetic artefact, or its rationalisation into systematic thinking through public access. It is a way of describing the action of subversion that takes the pulsion of linearity (learning about process on the internet), and meshes it with non-linear cultural mores (the results of learning on the internet). It is also a philosophical paradox that has been at the crux of debate since Plato proposed the workings of the memory in cognitive events. The paradox that is apparent today is explicable in terms of the analogy of the internet, which determines and locates an empirical map of the post-modern, disparate but connected mind.

Deleuze has tackled this paradox in terms of the history of philosophy, and the image of thought. Learning in this context, is the appropriate name for the subjective acts carried out when one is confronted with the objectivity of a problem (Idea), whereas knowledge designates only the generality of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions. Following Leibniz, Deleuze has suggested that to learn is to enter into the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, and into their corresponding singularities. It is a threshold of consciousness at which real acts are adjusted to our perceptions of the real relations, thereby providing a solution to the problem. And as a result, learning takes place in and through the unconscious, by establishing bonds of complicity between the mind and that which is outside of it. Daniel C. Dennett turned to plasticity to explain the work of learning. Plasticity makes the learning possible of everything which is not fixed in the system of representation. Cultural evolution, and transmission of its products, is, according to Dennett, the second new medium of evolution, and it depends on phenotypic plasticity in much the same way as phenotypic plasticity depends on genetic variation. We are able to ‘install’ the fruits of our cultural evolution as systems of habits in the partly unstructured brain (and so to learn about them).

Designating the unconscious as being the site of learning is not to make it obscure. In a similar way to the action of plasticity, the unconscious yields and buckles with the force of action, and rather than being ‘the Other’ of what we may conceive; it is the link between that which we may understand and that which is attracting the power of the mind (it is the journey to the Other). Placing the internet into this field of becoming, posits it as an exciting educational plane of interaction, communication and conception; it is more likely to reach the horizons defined by the instantaneous global theatre of economic transaction in the learning process. Deleuze has marked out the other aspect of learning to be the work of the apprentice, who constitutes and occupies the practical or speculative problems as such. The apprentice raises each faculty of the senses to the level of its transcendent exercise, and in so doing, attempts to grasp that which can only be sensed. This is the education of the senses, where a violence is communicated from one faculty to another, which nevertheless always understands the Other through the perfection of each. Yet Deleuze argues that we can never know in advance how someone will learn; for the limits of the faculties are encased one in the other in the broken shape of that which bears and transmits difference. Concomitantly, there is no one method for learning, a method is the means of that knowledge which regulates the collaboration of all the faculties; it is the manifestation of a common sense or the realisation of a Cognitatio natura, and this presupposes a good will as though this were a ‘pre-meditated decision’ of the thinker.

Culture, however, does not perform as if it were conducted by common sense. The movement of learning, which ‘installs’ cultural evolution as Dennett argued, links a sensibility, a memory and a thought with all the cruelties and violence necessary to provide a ‘training for the mind’ as was described by Nietzsche. This has lead Deleuze to say that there is something "amorous but also fatal about all education". The amorous side involves a familiarity with signs, the fatal appears at the edge of the space for the signs, helped by the heterogeneity of the signs that learning engenders. We learn when the teacher produces a heterogeneity of signs (non-linear functioning), and asks the student to ‘do with me’ rather than ‘do as I do’. By teaching in such a manner, the teacher opens up a field of signs which the student may develop, so that the student learns through the difference that is communicated through the limits of the senses, and not through the repetition of the Same (cf. the Electronic Body). Learning on the internet is a good example to embellish this theory of education, as the ‘virtual terrorist’ does not enter into a mimetic relationship with the teacher of the complex mathematics and coding operations; but attempts to unpack them, with the aim of renewing sensory-motivity (this is the excitement of cracking the code). We do not have to fall into a forced dialectic about conspiracy or the overthrow of democracy through malignant virtual terrorism; as it is a rich and stimulating field of signs which is more akin to the theatre than to politics. The aim of this education is to produce learning which makes apparent the heterogeneity of the new technology, and at the same time enables the incorporate this learning into a culture which will be attractive to a new generation schooled and familiarised on computers and the internet. Just as Zarathustra finds at the end of his spiritual odyssey, that he is able to transform the elements of the eternal return which have caused him to become ill into liberatory and redemptive repetition; the education of the virtual terrorists makes the learning of the internet a real movement of repetition that does not fall back into abstract linear exercises, but entangles the linear with the non-linear through engagement with the diversity and direction of internet culture.

Virtual terrorism uses the difference that opens up as culture develops on a virtual plane to produce post-modern (vital) learning. Yet there are pitfalls and dangers associated with such a project. Just as ABC news constantly broadcasts items that define terrorism with stereotyped images, and projects them into broader discourse about terrorism, (I found the information about virtual terrorism on the ABC website http://abc.go.com), it is important not to forget western state-sponsored terrorism and the violence which is inflicted in the name of the mainstream (fear of the Other, or difference). Umberto Eco intelligently framed the problematic around post-modern terrorism, in that terrorism is not the enemy of the great systems, but it is their natural counterweight, both accepted and programmed. If the great systems function as headless systems, having no protagonists and not living on individual egoism, then they cannot be struck by killing the king, or: "If there exists a completely automated factory, it will not be upset by the death of the owner, but rather by erroneous bits of information inserted here and there, making hard work for the computers that run the place". Eco suggests that in this situation, it is not enough for the terrorist to read Marx, they now also have to ponder Norbert Wiener. Capitalism functions due to the action of runaway cybernetic functioning in terms of the processing and distribution of information; if the virtual terrorists are to insert erroneous pieces of information, they need to know how this system works, and what information will act in the desired fashion in that system. This is not an easy task, given that the class struggle which seemingly defined existing society in history, is in a process of entropic dissimulation across electronic networks that are strategically placed at work and increasingly in school (hunters and gatherers in the digital curriculum). In the theatre of post-modern proclivities, capital is running riot almost primitively, as Baudrillard has neatly put it, the great cynical figure of capital, cannibalises all negativity, "parodistically going beyond its own contradictions."

This is an extremely serious point for education. David Punter has described well the continuing and widespread use of examinations in our education system. This archaic tradition, which extends the power of the State into the learning process, is readily accepted by capital, in that the candidates are simultaneously commodified, ordered, selected and produced; this action depending almost exclusively upon momentary expressions of subjective angst:

Most of us working in academic fields will be able to add our personal histories at this point. I realised the absurdity of the situation when studying philosophy at university. At the end of the year, after seriously examining questions and texts concerning the meaning of life; I was sat in a tiled Victorian examination hall, and required to write several essay style answers in the space of two and a half hours. The first question asked whether God existed, the others requested that I delve into the nature of the universe and the construction of the self. Now I am able to understand the roots of this examination system in Teutonic classification systems, and the connection between the administration apparatuses and examinations, which guarantees the legitimacy of the State. The Kantian professors of philosophy enacted an apparently metaphysical debate, which was at root political, and acted as an ideological justification for the separation of ideality and actuality, so that an existing political system, however corrupt, could be seen as a manifestation of a supra-phenomenal eternal order; it could be demonstrated as being a bourgeois extension of the divine right of Kings. Doing well in these examinations not only proves to be a personal achievement, but carries with it an initiation into responsibilities; demonstrating not only the absorption of a subject, but an operational fitness in the procedures necessary for handling the further dissemination of that subject. The examination is the guarantor of humanist education and a bureaucratic version of political power.

Learning on the internet is a clear break from the battleground of the examination hall and the clandestine power operations of the examiners and the administrative class. The difference opened up by the translation of culture onto the net, provides a space where the subjectivity of silent exam halls is a redundant anachronism to be obligingly dispensed with. The existential affirmation of authority is replaced by the dynamic clashing of virtual cybernetic worlds and the entities such as avatars, ghouls and spirits which inhabit them. Testing becomes pragmatic, in that the virtual terrorist seeks to find strategies that work. This process, which is parallel to post-structural investigation, involves the incorporation of diverse and disparate fields of signs, it requires the manipulation and skill at handling supple formulas which act as camouflage for the agent’s lifestyle and identity; the parallelism with post-structuralism lies in the way in which virtual terrorism dispenses with the dominance of the major ‘net’ narrative form. Taking away the necessity for examinations also removes the myth of teleology that sits as a sedentary marker at the end of the learning process. The raw experience of learning, which is devalued by examinations as revision, preparation and experiment; is reanimated as the agent uses the internet to structure his or her learning projects. This is, however, dependent upon high levels of self-organisation, which will only be achieved once repressive structures have been removed and the students are allowed to take more risks. Through this process of destructuralisation, the students redirect their learning and are able to rediscover a verve for education through a more direct contact with the cultural artefacts that they produce - there shall be increasing opportunities for this once the digital curriculum is operative. Digital convergence marks the point at which the learning process accelerates through digital transfer into a fully interactive curriculum. Ivan D. Illich made a similar break with tradition in his Deschooling Society (1970), in that he distinguished between schooling and learning; schooling in his terms propounded the institutional mythology of hidden curricula (e.g. capitalism, bureaucracy), learning was the actual experience of thought (both abstract and practical).

Illich proposed the workings of ‘learning webs’, which use technology to provide free speech, free assemblies, and a free press, and therefore, a universal education that everyone can choose to participate in or not. The learning webs of Illich, could be interpreted as parallel and complimentary to the utopian dreams of liberal democracy. The educational experiments that Illich put forward in the name of deschooling, are interesting exercises in the blurring of boundaries between age groups, gender and social divisions, or other discriminatory mechanisms which restrict education to the benefit of a certain ‘enabled’ strata of society. The sharing of resources, through the use of technology to enable participating agents to find other individuals or groups with similar interests does sound prescient of the current situation with the internet, and points to the clear educational purpose of possessing a technology which links students of differing backgrounds and locations. The internet certainly ‘fills out’ the qualitative experience of learning, in that access to global communication networks, allows the student to participate in a rich and stimulating variety of interactional processes. Yet the point about experiential diversity and quality does not address the complex issue of ‘what the student shall learn’. Simply transposing the current curriculum onto the net and using it as a knowledge or communicational resource, does not focus upon the difference that is opened up by the new internet cultures. It also neglects the historical point that social strata often respond to technological development by the strengthening of division (the have and have nots in the digital environment), rather than by quashing hierarchy. The digital curriculum on the net, therefore, has to be sensitive to the requirements of net culture in terms of mediated desire (cf. The Electronic Body), and the enforcement of restriction by the technological elite (in terms of not allowing it to happen).

Investigation into the history of radical education, unveils the fact that experimentation with educational models such as the deschooling and freeschooling movements has not been uncommon. The virtual terrorism of this thesis, is not a metanarrative approach, in that it does not propose the solution to current generic educational problems, across the board. Many of the ‘problems’ that are inherent in the educational process, such as alienation, lack of directed attention, indiscipline, lack of focus or relevance in course structure and content, or the poor delivery and performance of learning objectives; may well persist as the internet becomes more widespread throughout the educational process. The positive aspect of this thesis is to unlock some of the tendencies that are immanent in the use of the internet in and through education. Virtual terrorism cannot be seen as a reactive force against authoritarianism or the controlling powers in society, but it is an unconscious force for learning of a technology that has been spawned from the military defence systems of liberal democracy (i.e. the Arpanet, which was the predecessor of the internet came about as a collaboration between the American military and universities). In contrast to the deschooling and freeschooling movements; virtual terrorism does not necessitate the dismantling of the educational system, but uses the current apparatuses to ‘upload’ various strands of entanglement consciousness onto the net. We do not yet know the precise nature of these multiple consciousnesses (shamanism and voodoo, are, however, good approximations). We do know that the process of uploading will not follow a linear approach to learning that is dominated by examinations and surveillance (virtual terror represents the struggle against these forces yet is it undetectable as such through electronic camoflage). The formations that we have at the present time that are using non-linear, undirected learning, with dispersed sites providing a diversity of information; exemplify the research projects of the virtual terrorists. Robin Barrow has noted that the proposed learning webs of Illich and Everett Reimer, are devoid of content, in that their real proposals for learning lie in allowing students to join adults at an earlier stage than is presently permitted, and to learn their professions in situ, as was the case with apprenticeship before mainstream education became compulsory. Learning webs, therefore, become subsidiary to mimetic ‘craft-learning’, and it is hard to place their importance beyond providing the initial contact with prospective teachers of a chosen skill. Making the learning web an adjunct to the physical activity of work, effectively empties it of impetus, and perhaps more importantly in a post-modern environment, underestimates the position of the computer in most activities that the student shall have to embark upon in the workplace.

The raw experience of learning on the internet rarely results in direct satisfaction of starting objectives. In contrast to the provisions of a set lesson, where the teacher designs specific learning objectives for a given period of time; the time scale of the internet environment, which involves the navigation of virtual environments, must take account of hyper connectivity, which is one of the most intense aspects of the dispersed field that goes to make up ‘the net’. For example, the large amount of simple cross references and html links to other sites, makes for an irresistible tendency towards lateral movement, which is known as ‘surfing’ (the impetus within hunting and gathering in the digital medium), and is characteristic of the processes which take up much of the time on the internet. The joy of finding new and unusual sites, or following innumerable numbers of links until the initial inquiry is almost forgotten, will cause serious educationalists with definite objectives and a prescribed agenda, much frustration. The frenzied attempts by social scientists to pin down this activity in terms of interactivity, iterability, repetition, transportation, etc. proves the way in which learning on the internet is in the process of going beyond the educationalists, and is structuring a mutable occupation of the learner (a ‘bottom-up process’). Here we see a return to non-competitive play, where the agent is able to revel in gloriously peculiar landscapes; they are able to explore any latent desire by having a potential field of direct connection to individually constructed formulations of subjective obsessions. This is the carnivalesque and ecstatic (Bakhtin 1984, Baudrillard 1983) aspect of the internet, and the virtual universes which are being constructing due to the internet are becoming increasingly strange (as was noted in the Virtual chapter). Settling on a clearly commercial or unimaginative educational sites is progressively becoming more difficult as the agent has within a mouse click far more interesting, personal and stimulating material to survey (for example, the indecent, or the taboo). Censorship, or the attempt to cybernetically control the access to certain sites, pushes the agents to migrate to different pastures, and consigns them to follow desires as yet uncensored or recognised; virtual terrorism, therefore, includes the recognition that the internet provides a maze-like web for the exploration of the Other.

The question of the authoritarian (censorial) teacher is a particularly intractable one for the education of the virtual terrorists. What is the purpose of the instructional teacher, as the students surf about regardless of pre-set educational goals or objectives? The power relationship, through which the teacher directly interacts with the purposes of the student, is not relevant when they are in the process of learning on the net. My observations of students using the internet has usually been during their lunchbreaks or free lessons. I have been impressed by the sensible and efficient ways in which the students gather information for set projects, or research contemporary pop bands, or look at the effectiveness of web sites for advertising businesses. They have freely discussed the ways in which they use the internet, and how it is integrating into educational mores. Perhaps they would not have been as sensible if I had not been peering over their shoulders, yet the enthusiasm and skill which students readily demonstrate on the net, underlies the way in which the introduction of computers throughout society, has led to a lack of fear in the new technology, and a positive outlook for its integration into the learning process. I have come to the conclusion that the suggestion regarding the lack of control or educational purpose that the internet affords, derives in part from a misunderstanding as to how learning is changing due to pressure from digitalisation in society. This thesis does not concern itself with a definition of an ideal process, or an educational ‘blue-print’ for the use of the internet, but looks to engender the type of heterogeneity that has been mentioned to animate the field of signs which the internet feeds into. Through the comprehension of this process, the internet may be posited as a cultural resource for virtual terrorists, as a segment of a vital education.

However, the entanglement of the virtual terrorist is characteristically a double sided process. For example, C. Paul Olson has characterised the educational status of computers as being schizophrenic. Nestled within the discourse on the use of computers in schools, is the struggle concerning the ideology and practice of the politics of literacy. It has been well noted that the dream of a fully literate society, derives in part from the Enlightenment vision of education providing access to untrammelled and clear realms of the mind. The ability to process symbols, and to recognise their significance, was meant to encourage a moral order, and a sensibility that could create and appreciate the edifying ornaments of culture. By prioritising the centrality of Shakespeare in the curriculum, for example, we continue the myth of the literary society, and the education of literacy echoes with the classicist orientation of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche was perhaps the great ‘debunker’ of the Enlightenment; by showing that the highly prized Hellenistic values of the neo-classicists of tomorrow, were in fact the product of Dionysian intoxication and interpersonal violence. He argued that the two principal institutions of classic Greek society, were competitive games and the love of rhetoric in political discourse, which both depended for their cultural centrality upon hidden violence. Civilisation, as Germany of the nineteenth century understood it, was a rational ‘front’ hiding the deeper and altogether more important reality of sex and violence.

Virtual terrorism recognises the sex and violence of the internet, and does not wish to gloss over the impact of the move into digital education. Pornography is extremely prevalent on the net, though many educational technologists seem unwilling or unable to directly engage with the immense quantity of obscene material that will be available to students surfing in cyberspace. Censorship strategies will be deployed through server control, yet as has been argued, this will only encourage clever tactical manoeuvres to access the material through other means. Dan Thu Nguyen and Jon Alexander tap into the pervasive discussion of bodies on the net, by stating that the erotic drive that forces us to transcend our flesh, may have found it most dangerous accomplice in computer technology. The widespread realisation of perversions that have been hitherto consigned to murky closets, does make us wonder as to the actual depths of depravity that we may freely delve. Yet the moral reaction to ‘revelations’ of Catholic priests or public schoolmasters found with huge collections of paedophiliac pictures on their hard drives; should come as no great surprise given the lonely and sexually repressed existences which they lead. More importantly, we cannot allow the moral majority to determine that the internet is in some way an inappropriate place for minors to play. Just as the positive teaching of literature does not shy away from the issues of sexuality and violence contained, for example, in Shakespeare; the learning of the internet acts as a site for multifarious desirous exploration. There is no evidence to support the claim that extreme desires will spread into the actual enactment of perversion.

The internet gives rise to positive roles in terms of advocates of sexual activism in the public arena. In a new and hitherto unrecognised sense, it is possible to construct identities in cyberspace (see, Learning about cyberpunk chapter), and these identities may explore sexual identity without shame. Glorianne M. Leck has entertainingly described an occasion of queer activism in a Cracker Barrel restaurant in the US. The notion of ‘teacher as demonstrator’, draws attention to situations of discrimination by sexual orientation, such as the Cracker Barrel restaurants, where gay employees have been sacked or not hired. The activists sit in the restaurant dressed in such a way as to attract inquiry into their presence, whereupon they explain the discrimination of the organisation to consumers perhaps not aware of the specific prejudice against gay workers. This strategy has the advantage over simply discussing the situation on the net, or putting the facts on a website; because eaters in the restaurants become more aware that they are actually engaged in the process of discrimination, rather than finding out about it through having a particular interest in the politics. If successful, it also has the advantage of potentially becoming a ‘media event’, and spreading the message of discrimination further than the specific time and place of the activism.

The simple dichotomy of public and private spheres in terms of message dipsersal and learning is complexified through the net. It acts in a manner which is more similar to the transmission of oral culture than to written culture. The immediacy of learning through orality, gives private insight into public matters. Yet it also could be argued that the net gives public insight into private matters. The difference opened up by learning on the net is characterised by the reversibility of signs, because computer mediated interaction introduces a break or rupture from the despotism of the sign under the authority of the written word. Taken away from the linearity of written culture, digital mediation accelerates the transmission of information, and encourages new ways of understanding the circulation of signs, signification and meaning. The queer activists are able to gather support of a different and more focused kind through use of the internet, in contrast to the use of pamphlets or newsletters. This is an integral part of the event, in that it impinges upon and redefines identities that are involved with the acknowledgement and publicity of discrimination. In the classroom, outdated textbooks are dispensed with when we logon to the internet; networked CD Roms, and the growing technology attached to digital convergence become relevant and useful. Learning on the internet does not negate oral contact with the teacher (except perhaps when the students are ‘surfing’), but integrates with one-to-one learning through the exciting aspect of directed information gathering. The ‘truth’ of the inviolate sign of the word, is replaced by the potential for cyber-chat, and the establishment of the continuous plane of information hunting.

Walter J. Ong has noted that writing is a "particularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself even without the aid of etymologies". This describes the way in which writing ‘locks’ words into a visual field, so that the linearity of narrative becomes sacrosanct (e.g. grammar, spelling, textual reference in academic research, the logical efficiency and connectivity of propositions). In contrast, orality is a more fluid and less directable type of communication and learning, it has a bricolage quality of transferable replacement and non-linear expression without the direct effectuation of bildung (cultural construction). Cultivation of orality is possible, but before the non-linear processes of the internet become apparent (the cultivation and development of net orality), the formative learning of internet-orality would have incorporated linear written exercises or the transcription of speech and the structural analysis of pragmatic oral statements (such as speech making). The internet speeds up and transforms this process, because the necessity of linear transcription (from text to speech) is obviated, the pupils surf and discuss as an integral part of the process, learning is accelerated through rapid exploration and the integrative quality of the process (cyberintensity). Plato’s objection to writing was that it is an inhuman activity, pretending to establish outside of the mind what can be only in the mind. It is a manufactured product that destroys memory, those who deploy writing for their thought, will become forgetful, relying on an external source for what they lack in internal resources. Plato also argued that writing is unresponsive, because one does not get an immediate answer to questions, unlike the dynamism of real speech.

The internet loops culture back to orality and to the inscription of a pre-written space. The dynamism of real speech is activated in this digitally mediated space, because memory is not tied to the remembrance of written words arranged on a linear plane; it is a part of the processes of learning through a field of interest in the unconscious. It is in this sense that the internet demonstrates a mapping of the mind or how electronic intentionality works, it is to these ends that internal representation is not delimited to dreams or private thought processes, but it is part of a reversible matter flow, now finding a transient home in the electronic circuitry (mediation) flowing between computers (cf. Writing on Electronic Bodies). The objections that Plato made about writing do not directly apply to the internet, as we are in a sense taken full circle, away from a humanist education, and back into the darkness of non-directed thought – this has been characterised as the techno-tribal palaver. This may terrify some, or lead to the hysterical re-enactment of literacy programmes that are currently sweeping the curriculum (Britain 1998); yet the point of learning on the net is that in contrast to any previous educational aid, material desire and mental activity can be joined through its non linear processes.

The virtual terrorist sits in the fluid space of learning on the internet as a kind of ‘strange attractor’ to the future of education. The immense change of direction for the new digital curriculum, teaching methods and educational structures that will follow as society boots up to the net, are in a sense still ‘hidden’ beneath the enforced slavery of certain types of thought. Hassan Ben Sabbath, instilled absolute fear in political rivals whilst living in a remote valley to the north of Iran (Alamut Valley), from whence he sent his assassins to do his biding. He selected his prospective assassins and drugged them when asleep with hashish, after they awoke they would find themselves in a beautiful garden surrounded by scantily clad houris, who attended to every need and desire. After a couple of days apparently living in heaven, the hapless assassins would again be drugged and returned to their familiar squalid surroundings. Afterwards, Ben Sabbath would send for the assassins, who would be amazed at the accuracy of the account of their sojourn in paradise that Sabbath gave them. In awe of their new master, and believing him to hold the key to the next life, the assassins would set out on their killing duties with the conviction necessary as their assignments resulted in their certain death. (William S. Burroughs, however, asserts that this is the Marco Polo myth about Hassan Ben Sabbath, and that there were definitely no women in the Alamut Valley, which was a vigorously structured male state within a state). The myths and conditioning (Muslim and Christian that tie the word to the truth) that have to be overcome to open up the heterogeneity of internet learning, have been set with no less intent or thirst for power. Virtual terrorism is a matter of making the space to learn about the future through the internet.

The initial techno-hype of the internet is subsiding as the ennui of informational overload is beginning to become apparent. The internet signifies more than just the dream of educational technologists in terms of an unlimited realm of resource; it is also the pretext for a brand of western nihilism as yet unthinkable due to its sense of relativism, collapse of meaning and cultural schizo-cynicism. This is summarised by the expression, "we can know everything, therefore we know nothing". As an exemplar of this perspective, the educationalist Patti Lather has described the dénouement of the Enlightenment, positivism, and secular humanism, in the post-modern ‘scene’. Human reason and the will that it has engendered has undergone and is undergoing a series of involuted changes; rational thought in general has begun to explore its ‘foundations’ for the pulsion to encounter as yet untheorised categories and institutions (unconscious learning). Lather attempted a piecemeal reconciliation of the grounds for education (though not rationality) through deconstruction of the assumptions for research, and the treatment of scientific method as fiction and text. Lateral thought of this type is useful in that the authority of scientific education may be transferred away from the linear transmission of knowledge and the truth, and taken into contextualising movements of critical inquiry. Yet, in a similar and parallel manner to the ways in which the deconstruction of Derrida has led to the continuous lateral questioning of textual reference to discover the self-sameness of logos; educational authority loops back and becomes embroiled once again in ‘the text’ through the conjunction of simultaneous fictions that explain the functioning of post-modern educational power. The recursive action of fictional analysis reconstructs and reconfigures the power of the word through learning about text. This post-structural thesis does not allow such a movement, because the text is not the object of analysis. Similar chaotic drives to the ones which Lather explores are being excavated, yet the escape route into textual explanation is not offered. All that we have is the internet and an unknown future.

The question of the authority of the text of the internet, involves the unveiling of the power relations that the electronic medium has negotiated. George P. Landow has figured this problem in terms of the convergence of hypertext and critical theory, and the replacement of conceptual systems founded upon ideas of centre, margin, hierarchy and linearity with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links and networks. Using the work of Derrida, Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and Andries van Dam, Landow suggests that the convergence tendency of the electronic medium is an introduction to new modes of thought that shall become as important as the reading of narrative became through the technology of the printing presses. These modes of thought define a restructuring of time, and prepare us for a complex, non-linear time (cf. the previous chapter), where the acceleration in learning on the internet is one of a gamut of survival techniques present in the vernacular of global post-modern capitalism. Landow and his associates have carried out considerable research into this field, and report that students at university level develop lines of "asynchronous communication" during their courses conducted through hypertext. This communication preserves the structure of the courses whilst dispensing with the pressure of deadlines, or pre-set scheduling procedures. Students learn in an atmosphere of continuous discussion and project linkage, with hypertext documents serving to make the study of text a non-linear process of cross-referencing and the exploration of a plethora of connected material. The courses took on a different aspect to the presentment of isolated and studious competitors, attempting to take out limited numbers of books from the library on one subject at the same time. The real-time (and stored time as artefact) linking of the students meant that ideas could be shared during their development, and projects could be left or restarted depending upon answers to questions, or the settlement of discussion.

The implications for higher education are clear if such pilot projects were to be extended. Students would learn more broadly and they would produce work in a more communal atmosphere on the net. Positions of ‘difference’ could be rigorously maintained through discussion, topics could be brought into line with the desires and interests of the students, rather than being dominated by the wishes of the academic designing the course. Evaluation in this context is clearly not summative, but involves the immersion of the student in a process of collaboration. The roles of the students, teachers and any other participants who might become embroiled within the learning unit, result in an energy centre for the transmission and reception of code (cf. aesthetic packs in the Excursus). These micro-cultures are beginning to be understood, though the translation to recognisable cultural formations is blurred by the potential for camouflage which the electronic medium affords. Non-linearity begins to take on real force when it is not merely consigned to the scrambling of the code of the text, but it is also a part of the life choices of the participants in the process. Contrary to Landow, who begins to sound like a salesman for all things non-linear, and tries to position himself at the cross-roads and as the instigator of great avenues of non-thought (the introduction to complexive hypertextual), and there is undoubtedly immense potential here; the time of learning on the internet does not subsume or dominate other learning paradigms, or expressed differently, we cannot move to enforce a grand narrative of non-linear learning.

Ted Friedman, for example, notes that hypertext is a transitional genre particularly appealing to literary academia because it dresses up traditional literary study with post-modern multimedia flash. Dull literary courses may be given the appearance of relevance and current style through the presentation of ideas in hypertext. The authority of the linear narrative is questioned by this procedure; however, the production units of hypertextual critique are also ideal places for students to be carried through the system without interacting with the text in question. The agents in these courses become discouraged due to the intensity of communal scholasticism. Reading immense amounts of cross referenced and connected publications as Landow suggests, extends the linearity of the narrative form of learning through non-linear acts. The internet offers much more than protracted reading projects, in that it introduces the student to a maze of contemporary artefact. The interactivity of this type of hypertext learning is linear due to the fact that it produces and reinforces a narrative structure of reading and writing. The non-linear learning structure of the internet incorporates heterogeneous elements such as video, music, VR environments, graphics, as well as screens of text. The non-linearity of learning is dependent upon the feedback system which is produced between the student and the material. The complexity of the feedback on the net does not result in simple extensions of linear methodology (i.e. reading and writing exercises), but introduces the students to other ‘worlds’ of learning, that effectivley reanimate the process and intentionality of learning.

The ‘cutting edge’ of the internet are these ‘other worlds’; they represent the science fiction of the digitised medium, the sites where the future collides with the chaotic present. The communications systems connected to the internet present perhaps the most powerful technology that has ever been invented; in a sense that has never before been understood, the internet reverses the relationship that humans have with technology, it could be said that it is no longer a question of humans inventing technology, but of technology reinventing ‘the human’, and in particular, this reinvention involves the way in which humans communicate and, therefore, the communicative resources that humans have to define themselves. This reinvention may be understood through the many escape routes from the constraints of sedentary society that the internet affords. The space for learning of the internet opens up a complex, non-linear time that does not totalise or accumulate experience, but places it through the maelstrum of accelerated dimensions (cf. Gaming the Future); this is the chaotic material space where time breaks down. The chaotic material space cannot be eternalised into Platonic essence, or reproduced as perfunctory knowledge (the internet is not a library); on the contrary, the space of the internet coheres the glutinous remnants of intellect and desires driven by excess (proto-materialist libido). Expressed another way, the cybernetic machine that the internet is a vital segment of, is an immense system of constraint, hierarchicalised and shaped by flows of communication and capital (polarisation). To challenge this machine in terms of the learning parameters of the net, is to move the pragmatic and theoretical emphasis away from its automatic binding elements (capitalist control), and to enter into a fluid relationship with the spaces left by repetition and control (virtual terrorism).

Following on from and by extending this point, it could be said that the internet is by analogy the end game of western theology. Nicholas de Cusa conceived of the notion of the "Machina Mundi" in terms of the Great Chain of the World (1440), with a God that was not separated from nature, but was an intrinsic part of it as steersman (Greek, kubernets) or governor (Latin, gubenator). This Machina Mundi has a centre which is everywhere and a circumference which is nowhere, for God is its centre and circumference and God is everywhere and nowhere. The Great Chain of medieval theology which de Cusa theorised, operated as a hierarchy of constraints, governing various subsystems, including human society, within an organically organised whole. The ultimate constraint on all communication in the system (production, reproduction, exchange, maintenance, interaction) is embodied in the mysterious principle called God. Anthony Wilden has argued that God in this system is a metaphor, and taken seriously as a metaphor, it symbolises the ultimate constraint on all past, present and future behaviour on the planet; this constraint we now call entropy. Wilden contends that entropy is qualitative as well as quantitative, depending on "the qualitative signification of a chosen relation between ‘order’ and ‘disorder’". It is a characteristic of arrangement, the arrangement of God being the maximum concordance of differences, (De concordantica catholica, 1433); total entropy is also achieved when a system is described as having all differences equalised. Wilden contrasts the hierarchically constrained universe (a simple ecosystem), from the linear or efficient causality which is assumed to operate in the isolated, mechanical, equilibrium systems of a Newtonian universe.

The distinction made by Wilden could be used as a methodology for distinguishing between modernist mechanical society and medieval feudal society; the organic whole bound by the constraints of God, and our understanding of entropy as a scientific theory, works in contrast to and is distinguished from the straight lines of progress, industrialisation and machines which do not pertain to the whole. However, in post-modern society, the internet is an amalgum of machines that do pertain to the whole (through global capitalism), and therefore these micro-machines reactivate entropy in the sense of a cybernetically controlled (feedback) communication machine of the whole. The concept of God from the perspective of Marxism, was simply a set of ideological ‘representations’ of the real and material conditions which govern the mode of production dominant in medieval times and the ‘reproduction’ of medieval society itself. Supplemented with information theory, Wilden argues that, "...these ideological constructs represent to consciousness (and to the unconscious), at the level of ideas and images, the ‘semiotic’ organisation of the medieval economic structure by the information flowing through the system at all levels". Control and constraint are imposed on the system by the various sememes and signs, levels and types of information which make up its organisation; these are ".....encoded in various sign systems: in money, in capital, in commodities, in artefacts, in the patterning of the natural landscape by human activities, and in the structure of social relations". Thus the ideological representations function as ‘metastatements’ about the ‘deep structure’ of the system; various forms of communication within the system, for example, writing, painting, architecture, music, are describable as messages set in a deeply structural code. Wilden defines the code as a set of rules governing the permissible construction of messages in the system.

Using this model, we may perceive how the theology of the whole, that requires an ‘unmoved mover’, is a metaphor for the stasis of the system, and this allows us to access an overview of the form of constraint that the organisation defines. Global, late or post-modern capitalism, that is accelerated and defined through its communication systems, similarly provides the pretext for understanding the post-modern shifts in control, down to semiology and social relations. This analysis does not provide ‘metastatements’ as Wilden hoped, ("there is no ideology", sic Deleuze and Guattari; which is a vital part of post-structural education, in that it defies the dominance of meta-narrative format). Also the gap or space between the representation of capitalism and capitalism qua capitalism, is unrepresentable because capitalism circumvents planar development. What we are left with are the coding techniques of global capitalism which we may destructuralise in terms of the forms of constraint that have been set in place in order to control the learning process. The digital medium of the internet, where signs are reversible, dispersed and in many ways viral; substantiates the claim that the cybernetic equation of the global communication system acts in such a way as to simultaneously provide almost total control of any communicative interaction (tracking) and release from intentional ‘face-to-face’ interactivity (digital camouflage). This is the vacuum in which the unconscious surges, and where agents learn.

It could be said that, the mapping of the coding techniques of post-modern capitalism, and the constraints that this imposes upon learning on the internet, presents a complex arrangement of signs and relations in time and space (local interactions leading to universal interruptions). The time of the internet incorporates a form of communication that resembles an immense digital marketplace, selling everything from people to software, from holiday homes to maps of the moon. This gigantic commercial enterprise never rests, it depends entirely on the interest generated from the identity and the design of the websites, and has a quick turnover of sites and innovation as companies go to the wall or servers are not maintained. Agents learning on the net encounter multiple inducements to part with the details of their credit cards, and will soon be able to satisfy their desire for products not readily available in their local neighbourhood. Marshall McLuhan (1964) would have considered this aspect of the internet as being a ‘hot’ media. The immersive commerciality of many parts of the net initiate a type of ‘dumbing down’ of the agent, and a passive acceptance of uncritical desires (for example, Homer Simpson surfing on the net and being conned into buying an assortment of useless items). The lack of imagination that this type of media may induce does not bode well for creative education (in terms of produced artefacts). However, the motivation to learn is galvanised by using the internet, as specific desires are focused and brought to the surface of the learning activity through the use of a digital medium to discover information. The quality of striving in learning, which is known as ‘conation’ is strengthened by the use of the internet as the access to information is increased. Kathryn Atman has argued that conation is one of the principal factors that determine success in distance learners (Atman 1987), and learning on the net may be placed into the category of multi-directional distance learning.

The machina mundi of the internet constrains the learner in terms of being driven by post-modern illusion (capitalist entropy), but rather than this signifying ‘ultra-modernism’ or the extension of the senses that McLuhan has theorised, this constraint defines a space for difference in terms of cultural artefact. The increasing ease of the production of web sites, means that agents will be able to actively transfer their desires into individual or collective electronic creativity. Steven G. Jones has looked at this development in terms of a socially constructed space and the post-modern geography that it entails (Soja 1989). Jones has located the need for new communities as the old ones break down, and points to the fact that we are now able to create community technologically. As society moves in this direction, education benefits from what has been termed as the "rhetoric of the electrical sublime" (Carey 1989) , whereby the investment in electronic hardware is touted as the solution to social problems. Booting schools up with computers, in these terms, is a simple political fix to broader social problems, as it could be claimed that the social space which is created on the net does not equalise the differences in society as a whole. The social space which is constructed on the net is highly illusionistic and virtual, and it does not address issues of the permanent underclass. Jones questions the authentic nature of the cybersociety created through computer mediated community (CMC), as it is basically a use of space and time, rather than being an abstraction in space and time, which was the case in society constructed before technology allowed for extensive mediation (Mumford 1934). The CMCs are characterised by a fluidity and mobility (and not place), in that the constructed social space does not remain fixed in narrative terms or in the terms of the status of the participants in its fold (digital nomadism).

Jones puts many of the claims about the new cybersociety down to the "mythos of the electronic revolution" (Carey 1993), where the fidelity of cyberspatial social relations is kept as an analogue to physical social relations, and a false homology is made between the two. He argues that this action misunderstands the notion of community by replicating the rhetoric of the fascists, who built a deeply divided and oppressive society through technology and social production, and called it community (Volk). On the net, in conceptual terms, the technology is not so much a space for community, as a passage point or medium for the ritual sharing of information. Social scientists have found it extremely difficult to define community precisely, falling prey to the commonly known errors of instrumentalism, and the replication of subjective belief (about community) in objective study (on community). At best, communities may be understood as complexes of variable social relationships and ideas, yet they escape identification of vital character or structure (from the outside). Jones identifies the need for the conceptualisation of space and the social, and the inquiry into connections between social relations, spatial practices, values and beliefs. The ability to create, maintain and control space (whether it is virtual, nonplace or networld), links us to notions of power and necessarily to issues of authority, dominance, submission, rebellion and cooption, which Etzioni (1991) has established as primary criteria of community.

The identification of ‘top-down’ power relations on the net, however, does not bring us nearer to the unconscious learning that will proceed there (the virtual terrorist is not top-down). It is not clear how the struggles of history, and the formation of tumultuous communities, is going to be uploaded into cyberspace on the large scale. Whilst the interactivity and power relationships of the new media cannot be denied, the question remains as to whether they will lead to communities vying for power in ways which reflect this media, or whether processes which have already shaped history shall be repeated on the web. Currently the commercial wars between servers, O/S mediums, software designers, PC manufacturers, ‘dotcom’ companies, and the like, are primarily a technical sparring to fill out the needs of the market for cheap and reliable access to the internet and an adequate choice of useful and interesting services. The feedback for real communities is a leap into the science fiction of the social. The future as such is a maelstrum of post-modern capitalism; accelerated and globalised by the new media. As has been noted, this emergent culture inscribes a pre-written space in contrast to literary culture, and learning will take place in this space to accelerate the processes of inscription. This pre-written space, however, does not directly lead to idealised tribal village communication as Marshall McLuhan and Howard Rheingold have suggested (the electronic village), but points more obliquely and disparately to the hunters and gatherers in the electronic media (Meyrowitz 1986).

Notions of the electronic village or community of computer mediation, derive in part from the understanding that the internet is the end game of western theology. By tending towards the whole, it is possible to conceptualise the equalising of difference in a fully entropic global communication system. Yet the tendency towards the whole is also an escape route from it; just as it was necessary to enact the communist revolution of Marx in order to place it as a transitory and material piece of ideal history; the computerised revolution of the internet is a necessary fiction that makes us aware of the material forces that are at play in its formulation. The political forces which place the internet into the classroom as an educational tool, cannot predict the outcome of this placement, as the students learning on the internet will not conform to the same forces as their placement (this is a complex non-linear entanglement arrangement). Allan E. Goodman et al. predict that the computerisation of the classroom will lead to its deconstruction as a formal structure. The variously formulated ‘virtual classrooms’ take similar lines into the future, extending ideals of choice, making learning a lifelong occupation to be married with work or play; the agents in these technological settings of the future benefitting from a universally ‘wired’ and interactive society. Beneath this ideal structure, lie the power centres where real people exist and desire, even if more and more of their daily experience is mediated through computers. Deleuze and Guattari have provided an analysis which engages with these micro powers:

It is on this level of micro-organisation that the changes due to the time of the internet are happening. There is not a conscious non-linearity occurring as direct positive feedback due to the electronic circuitry (except perhaps in populations deprived of the technology); the non-linear process is more concretely, an unconscious restructuring of the microtexture of the power centres within it. In contrast to the dualism of the public and the private or the political and the personal; the time of the internet presents an undiachronic investment in heterogeneity. It could be said that the machinic phylum of the internet is a focused instability, that implicates communication and intelligence with a bizarre range of new powers (through the unconscious learning involved with swarms of electronic forces). The ability to access immense amounts of information, to perceive extremely idiosyncratic desires and to examine the cultural artefacts of the techno-tribe; all point to new forms of the mind and possibly mental disease as yet unthinkable (psycho_net_aphilia?) Jerome Bruner has expertly presented the difference being drawn out here, when he said that, "the ways of the mind are enabled, indeed often brought into being, by learning to master what has been described as a culture’s ‘toolkit’ of symbolic systems and speech registers. There is thinking and meaning making for intimate situations different in kind from what one uses in the impersonal setting of a shop or office". This is precisely what the internet does not provide, the symbolic systems and speech registers are obviated or at least rearranged, and they are replaced and overlaid by ‘non-situational’ complexities of undirected inscription. The unconscious learning of the internet, therefore, does not provide a training ground for the mores of sedentary society. The proper name (the personal project and consequent symbolic register), towards which the student of Bruner would strive, is dissolved beneath a host of microtextual avataristic internet identities.

Deleuze (1985) has complained about this replacement and overlaying in terms of the incessant chatter of undirected speech that arises from mediocre cultural production, such as the French literary TV program Apostrophes, or the omnipotence of boring ‘couples’, or formulaic novels written by journalists. He claims that if literature is going to die it will be by assassination, as the conformity of production for the market will subsume creative forces, and no-one will notice singular creation (that is not represented in the market). Audio-visual production does not replace literary production in these terms, but suffers from the same reduction in creative possibilities that bowing to a mass market engenders. The internet particularises a similar movement towards hyper-commercialism, which is precisely why strategies which unfold the time of the internet in terms of singular educational pursuits, are a creative necessity for computerised learners. The prising apart of thinking and meaning making as, for example, Bruner proffers, does not take place on the internet in terms of a situational or contextual analysis, which enables systematic and specific ‘skill-learning’; the learning structure meshes and spreads instantaneously through the virtual and the non-directed. The microtextures present in the power structures of the internet process this procedure, and allow its dispersal in terms of information, and information about the information, etc. In these microtextures there are unprecedented opportunities for zones of indiscernibilty, where identities circulate and information loses its meaning (as to who benefits from it and its intentionality): concurrently, the results of the analyses of modernist power structures in the manner of Foucault, lose their rhetorical placement as ‘post-modern’ or directable as such, they are merely layers which we may increasingly put on top of one another.

However, it is futile to prefix the time of the internet with post-...... ad infintum, as if the mediated future disavows the past. Alvin Toffler (1970), looked into the future, and saw global capitalism determining a new genre of education that would replace the factory skills of the past with the flexibility necessary for jobs in high technology (information and control). His predictions regarding super industrialism combined with councils of the future to speculate about curricula and teaching methodology, assume that the extension of control shall permeate in the social direction of hyper-industrialism; and he subsequently frames worrying possibilities such as the educational use of ‘smart-drugs’ to enhance IQ. Industrialists would undoubtedly concur with these predictions, and the merging of education and industry, especially in higher education, has transpired along some of the lines that Toffler predicted (for example, the Warwick Education/Industry centre). Studies such as, The Information Society, by William J. Martin, confirm the movement of control throughout every aspect of society, by pinpointing the flows of information at each strata of the socius. With information packaged and processed into any shape that it could ever take (through digital convergence), systematic regulation of any communication becomes possible; this is because a form is therefore discernible that connects the most innocently naive utterance to intelligence secrets at the heart of governments (communicative continuity). Information theorists work under the assumption that universal units of information (pixels), flow like electricity to animate the circuits which they visit. Yet the quantification of information is not directly analogous to the quantification of energy; whilst both mechanisms serve objectifiable ends, the means of production (an energy plant, and a state system) are clearly divergent.

Governments do wish to capture, regulate and control the flow of information present on the internet, but the raw material of the net is cultural production (the pixel is a tool); which can extinguish or expand the distinction between expression and content. At the furthest extent of rigorous (Newtonian mechanical) scientific discourse, the distinction between expression and content is at its strongest, and the pixels of information are clearly definable and able to be used in formal situations. In the confused palaver of the net, where power approaches a microtexture, and the focus of instability designates a zone of indiscernibility; content and expression are merged, and they are translatable onto a smooth plane of digital interaction. The distinction between expression and content is not only merged, it is also complexified; the duality that exists between formal expression and folk psychology dissolves, therefore, beneath a bewildering array of communicative possibilities (digital synthesis). The linguist Louis Hjelmslev untied the duality between expression and content by "weaving a net out of the notions of matter, content and expression, form and substance". The unmetaphorical ‘net’ of post-modern communication technology does not only have implications for language, but permeates society itself, or the strata of society as Deleuze and Guattari term them with reference to geology. It is clear from the work on emergent communities on the net, (e.g. Cultures of Internet 1996, Internet Culture 1997), that the complex movements associated with the new media are sufficiently differentiated to be ‘stratified’, yet this stratification also forms intricate cross-over points, through which there exists the possibility of an undifferentiated plane (Hjelmslev termed this as matter, Deleuze and Guattari use the expression ‘body without organs’ to mark the undifferentiated plane, Irigaray speaks of contiguity, digitalisation creates its own singular plane of interactivity).

Hjelmslev’s net leaves no ground for dualism between expression and content, as he utilised all the resources of real distinction, reciprocal presupposition and general relativism, to define each in their mutual solidarity as opposed (relative) functives of one and the same function. In so doing, the space is produced to theorise matter in a quantum universe. Echoing the quantum mechanics of Niels Bohr, the relativisation and implication of any procedure (in others) concerning the plane of matter - this is the unformed, unorganised, nonstratified or destratified body and all its flows, fgor example, subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities - and they make it possible to destructuralise the work of procedure. Niels Bohr was concerned with the distinction between the scientific observer and the phenomena under scrutiny, and the fact that any interaction between measuring devices and that which is measured defines a quantum relationship. Bohr speaks of the impossibility of any "sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear". This irreducible interaction does not form a unity between observation and phenomena, governed by a classical economy of synthesis, but it defines a complex and shifting complementarity.

This complex complementarity, where the procedures and methods of investigation are rigorously implicated in the matter of investigation (and escape routes from it), define a post-structural educational stance for understanding the time of the internet. It is a relative stance, and in no way does it define a non-theoretical or ‘mystical’ space which defeats the interruptions of investigation, but, as Bohr elaborates with relation to physics, "the notion of complementarity points to the logical conditions for description and comprehension". The conditions by which investigation into the educational process of the internet is possible, require that non-directed, unorganised, subconscious particles of learning are ‘mapped’ on a field that does not attempt to solidify this fluidity into structured methods of comprehension. Similar in kind to the discoveries of behaviour at the subatomic level, where particles exhibit complex behaviour in time and space, the education of the net does not need abstract ‘models’ for its comprehension, but rather ‘channels’ of complementary theory that turn in swathes with the transitory and ubiquitous formations of internet students. The procedure of investigation into the education of the internet cannot be seen to impart stratified notions which are not implicated in the undifferentiated mass of the net; limited theoretical placements would be subsumed by the complexity of the communication involved, and the irreducible gap between the notion of net understanding, and the processes of the net themselves.

To this extent, the quantum materialism of the net opposes metaphysics. As a dynamic field of investigation, the internet is a real formation of power centres, material transaction and learning about the future. In a recent study of the emergent net culture, Manuel Castells has integrated the informational mode of development with the modes of production in their historically determined heterogeneity of institutional arrangements. The most distinctive result of this investigation is the theorisation of what Castells called "the space of flows" through integrated global networks. The space of flows is described as having at least three layers that are: 1) Technical; the circuit of electronic impulses (the micro-electronics, telecommunication, hardware in general) that form the technological infrastructure of the network. 2) Geographical; the topology of the space formed by its nodes and hubs. Hubs are defined by the networks but link it to specific places with specific social and cultural conditions. Nodes are the "location(s) of strategically important functions that build a series of locality-based activities and organisations around the key functions of the network". 3) Social; the spatial organisation of the managerial élite using the network. Castells uses the ideas of timeless and placeless time to describe the sequence of the space of flows. Timeless time occurs when the characteristics of a given context, namely, the informational paradigm and the network society, induce systematic perturbation in the sequential order of phenomena performed in that context. The placeless time refers to the dissolving of geographical distance in the space of the flows, organisational logic being placeless, it is fundamentally dependent upon understanding the space of flows that characterises information networks.

Castells presents an analysis of the commercial and corporate aspects of network culture, and an osmotic approach to the future of education depending more fully on private funding. It is clear from his study that network culture overruns traditional notions of society, by galvanising an internal logic, or the space of flows as he terms it. As industries relocate, and they transplant similar corporate structures through computer networks; it is apparent that they are using this space of flows by keeping them intact, and as an abstract transplantable model of passages to nodes and hubs (in contrast to post-structuralism). Geography in this context is transformed through the cross-sectional gathering and use of information. With the memory banks of post-modern industry as ‘larders’ of information, and the internet as a ‘happy hunting ground’, the agents of this schema pass through the space of flows as so many members of the pack. Power itself is concentrated in the space of flows, and the flexibility of process that allows hierarchy, status and influence to have its intentionality guided by the fluidics of the timeless and placeless situation. If the institutes of education and learning in the time of the internet are to transmit the code necessary for agents to join these fluid processes, they have to place themselves fully within these flows.

However, we may legitimately ask the question, do we want our identities to be washed away by this timeless space of flows? The time of the internet defines a set of entanglement strategies for post-structural education, as has been elaborated. Castells, however, addresses this question through an analysis of ‘the self’ in network society, and the sites of resistance to the omnipotence of global network capitalism (and its corporational models). He identifies the "condition of structural schizophrenia" as characterising the work of the space of the flows, as it impinges upon the self. He differentiates between three different types of identity when approaching the structure of schizophrenia, they are: 1) Legitimising identity; introduced by the dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalise their domination over social actors. Legitimising identities generate civil societies in the sense of the original Gramscian concept of a set of ‘apparatuses’ which were mirrored by Althusser’s State Ideological Apparata (SIA). These reproduce what Max Weber called rationale Herrschaft (rational power). 2) Resistance identity; produced by those actors who are in a position/condition of being excluded by the logic of domination. Identity for resistance leads to the formation of communes and communities as a way of coping with otherwise unbearable conditions of oppression. 3) Project identity; proactive movements which aim at transforming society as a whole, rather than merely establishing the conditions for their own survival in opposition to the dominant actors. Feminism and environmentalism fall into this category. Castells theorised the weakening of the influence of traditional legitimising identities such as the nation state as they are under attack from the space of flows, which gather into them a process of internationalisation. Global monetary markets from the late 80s onwards have connected, and now form a structure that defies central organisation from any one nation state (this is the undifferentiated plane of post-modern capitalism into which digital envelopment feeds). Castells put his hope in the rise of resistance identities and their links with the project activists, in order to fill the social hole left as civil society loses its legitimacy, and the structure of schizophrenia in the space of the flows threatens to knock stable identity out of the water. This thesis places the techno-tribe in this space, which doesn’t preclude this type of Castellian linkage, but allows more room for undirected subconscious behaviour.

Yet even these formulation seems to be tainted with schizophrenia. Perhaps it is better not to try to demarcate stable identities in the time of the internet, but to follow the aim of Deleuze and Guattari, and to draw escape routes from the prisons of the self through schizoanalysis. However we ask the question as to whether or not we wish our identities and values to be washed away in the flood of electronic circuitry, do any answers to this question hold any ‘truth’ or singularity, given that the act of legitimisation depends upon a reflexivity not possible in the channels of the flows? (the ‘before’ identity not being sequenced with the ‘after’ identity in the digital arena of the net). Students learning on the internet will encounter and be able to take on various social, sexual, political, spiritual and intellectual identities; these are certainly not stable, but they are intricate, real and impossible to contain within a limited rendering of ‘the human’ or ‘the self’. On a larger scale, the groupings that will arise out of this mediated exploration of identity depend strongly upon the cultural artefacts that they produce, and the material conditions that allow agents to get up from behind their monitors and socialise. The internet social formations include Star Trek societies, X-philites, sexually liberated group meetings, UFO and New Age religious units, ravers and right wing militias. These give some indication of the types of collectivity that the internet encourages. These processes of formation are taking place within the space and time of the flows, and are often located within the logic of corporational organisation. This is the wholesale movement of culture and the entanglement processes that internet socialising seems to encourage. The linearity of the virtual class, defines the intentionality of the most homogenous organisations, whilst the time of the internet allows heterogeneity to emerge within the tenets of post-modern learning (about culture and consequently lifestyle choice).

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