Essays on Cultures, Markets, Identities - and Us.

Knowledge and its price

The knowledge society lacks fundamental information about its own inner working.

An essay on the globalisation (and diversification) of culture, on translation disparities, and the uncomfortable economics of cultural diversity on the treshold of the forthcoming universal digital library. Here.

A keynote given at the 2006 International Conference on the Digitisation of Cultural Heritage, delivered in Salzburg on June 21, 2006.

 

Google Print, or knowledge is power

With Google Print , Google aims to realise the age-old dream of making all knowledge available at any time to anyone. But the notion that a single machine, company or algorithm is able to organise all freely available knowledge in a position of overwhelming dominance is hard to reconcile with the principles of cultural diversity. Here.

Cultures unplugged:
Charting the divide

Paradoxically, globalization and digitisation generate new forces of fragmentation. As the world wide web integrates global flows of information and cultural goods on the highest levels, locally and regionally, things dramatically fall apart.
Case studies, facts and figures, analyses.

More.

The cultural life and the cultural industries are subject to a sweeping change as it occurred to the steel industry in the early 1970ies, or to musical entertainment in the early rock'n roll years after World War II.
Industries that until recently were synonymous not only to wealth, but to the cultural identity of nations, have been turned into global conglomerates. The old glue between creation and the audience falls apart. The consensus that used to make culture an integrative force, a machine to produce identity, is gone. Or, in the phrase coined by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz: "What is a Culture, if not a Consensus?"

More.
 

The Many Many Books – for Whom?
Sustaining diversity, embracing innovation,
and developing corporate behaviour.

Three key challenges to the book industry.
Rüdiger Wischenbart, with Hugh Look (Rightscom), at the 3rd International Conference on the Book.
Oxford Brookes University, 11 September 2005.
 

European Publishing Market Watch

An overview of book, newspaper, magazine and directory markets in Europe, commissioned by the European Commission, DG Enterprise.

Results and Executive Summaries here.

 

Now! Everything! And Then What?
Comments on the Rift Between the Many Cultures.

I was standing at Times Square in New York recently when I experienced one of those rare moments in which thoughts and impressions that had long been racing wildly and confusedly through my head and colliding with one another suddenly become orderly and present a clear picture.

Ars electronica, 2001.

   
(c) by Rüdiger Wischenbart 2003 - 2008