Abstracting knowledge formation: A report on academia and publishing

Considered across the long reach of history, it is evident that the dominant formation of knowledge is becoming more abstract. More recently, this process has been super-charged by a changing culture of inquiry that puts a hyper-intensified emphasis on rational codified investigation with commodifiable outcomes. This is to argue that the dominant processes that frame knowledge formation are fundamentally changing, not that all the content of knowledge is necessarily becoming more abstracted or distanced from the object of inquiry. The key distinction here, for the purpose of our argument, is between form and content.