This book articulates the complexities inherent in higher education's multi-faceted response to the forces of mediatization-or how institutions change when their social communication gets mediated by technology-and introduces a novel perspective to comprehend them in a systematic way. By drawing on archival analysis and six organizational case studies, the author empirically traces the emergence of a cyber-cultural institution within higher education. As these case studies demonstrate, this new institutional logic requires creativity, individual recognition, and an underlying platform powered by cyber technologies and digitization of content. Using an analytical lens, this cyber-cultural perspective answers many questions about why faculty refuse to adopt online education, why students struggle with mediated teaching, and what possibly could be done to take online education to its next level.

This book articulates the complexities inherent in higher education's multi-faceted response to the forces of mediatization-or how institutions change when their social communication gets mediated by technology-and introduces a novel perspective to comprehend them in a systematic way. By drawing on archival analysis and six organizational case studies, the author empirically traces the emergence of a cyber-cultural institution within higher education. As these case studies demonstrate, this new institutional logic requires creativity, individual recognition, and an underlying platform powered by cyber technologies and digitization of content. Using an analytical lens, this cyber-cultural perspective answers many questions about why faculty refuse to adopt online education, why students struggle with mediated teaching, and what possibly could be done to take online education to its next level.