Higher Education and Global Challenges Engelska 2007

We live in a world in crisis, in a knowledge society, and in an era in which time is fluid, nothing lasts, everything changes and is unstable. The diverse and heterogeneous society of the new millennium is characterised by a series of internal crises in the welfare state: the social crisis, the environmental crisis and unsustainable practices, the crisis of states, the threat posed by globalisation, and finally, the crisis of democracy. The consequences of these crises include the exacerbation of social and economic inequality; the emergence of a global form of planetary management with new decision-making centres that have undermined the decision-making power of individuals and states; and citizens" loss of confidence in the democratic system due to the perception that political decisions are distant and difficult to influence. When new forms of knowledge and symbolisation qualitatively impregnate all basic aspects of a society, or when a society's structures and processes for reproducing itself are so penetrated by knowledge-dependent operations that information creation operations, symbolic analysis and expert systems are more important than other factors of production, then we"re talking about the knowledge society (Innerarity, 2010). The major challenge facing a knowledge society is the generation of collective intelligence: society's intelligence as a whole is more important than just having a society composed of multiple individual intelligences. Bertman (1998) described life in today's society as a “nowist culture” and a “hurried culture”, because we place more importance on brand-new, high-impact things than on those which require exploration. According to Bauman (2007), we have gone from linear time to pointillist time: what matters is the moment, and our identities are continually being built and modified.