21ST CENTURY TALKS, “New Technologies and Knowledge: culture or commerce?”

             Paris, March 12 – The 17th session of the 21st Century Talks took place on March 9 at UNESCO Headquarters and focused on New Technologies and Knowledge: Reflections on the Future with the participation of two renowned personalities: economist and futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, the founding president of the Foundation on Economic Trends; and the writer and philosopher Michel Serres, who is a member of the French Academy and professor at Stanford University.

             In his introduction, Jérôme Bindé, who is in charge of the 21st Century Talks, stressed the many questions raised by this crucial subject: “Are the new technologies going to open up a digital chasm between rich and poor? Are they going to facilitate distance education for all throughout life, while a new economy of service providers and users is emerging, based on the networks and services of the third industrial revolution and on the key issue of access? Are we headed towards the diversification or uniformization of knowledge? Towards an opening up of disciplines and increased communication of knowledge, or, on the other hand, towards a restriction of knowledge and its private appropriation through the systematic implementation of intellectual property protection? Are the new technologies, like all major technological revolutions, going to impact the production of knowledge, scientific processes, and even the paradigms of science themselves, the cartography of disciplines?”

             Jeremy Rifkin maintained that we are beginning to see the outlines of a new economic era, different from that of market capitalism which was, in turn, different from the mercantilism which preceded it. We are in an era marked by the movement from markets to networks: “The issue is access. […] The new technologies allow us to organize life at the speed of light […] while the existing markets are too slow. We are moving from geography to cyberspace. We have been organizing economic life in geographic terms for 10,000 years, today basic communications have to speed up to reach the speed of light. And this is changing everything.” 

            Another even more far-reaching change is taking place, according to Mr Rifkin: “We are shifting from ownership to access. What we own is no longer the physical object but access to the flow of experiences. We buy a service, an experience. What we pay for is intellectual capital, cultural production.” By way of an explanation, Mr Rifkin highlighted the difference between networks and markets: “In a market we make money by the margin on the transaction. In a network, we make money the exact opposite way, by pooling risk and sharing the savings. So there is no adversary. The family can be the whole globe. We are witnessing a concentration of power in networks. Networks inherently destroy markets.”

             Mr Rifkin spoke of a major challenge facing all of us: “In a network where we pay a subscription, where there are licensing agreements, our relationships risk becoming more and more  commercial  and less and  less social, familial.”  Noting that “the margins are in culture,leisure, sport, the Web, even social causes,” he indicated that “the new resource is cultural and the great struggle in the 21st century is the struggle between culture and commerce. We have to stop culture from becoming completely commercial.”

             How can a balance be established between culture and commerce? Mr Rifkin founded his hope on Europe, on continental Europe in particular, France, Italy and Germany: “Culture is a gift, a mosaic, something we create together. Cultural identity must come before commercial identity.”

             Are we going to lose culture? In reply to this question, posed by Mr Rifkin, and to his appeal to continental Europe, Michel Serres showed greater optimism: “We are going through a decisive period of major change and we must seek that which we are losing and that which we will gain. I believe that the revolution of the new technologies is, in a way, much older than we think. I do not believe that there is a linear history that starts with the hard technologies – i.e. the range of tools we use on the anthropological scale – to the soft technologies, the ones dealing with energy on the information scale. There is a double history: that of the hard technologies and that of the soft technologies. But today we are facing an explosion of the soft technologies which, for this very reason, exploit culture.”

             Mr Serres maintained that what is changing is “the human subject, the cognitive subject. We are also changing our scientific paradigms completely. Science is no longer at all what it used to be.” But he is not worried about either the deep transformation of either the human subject or of scientific paradigms. “This is not new in the world of sciences,” he said. “The cognitive subject has often changed in keeping with the development of the soft technologies.”

             On the subject of culture he said: “Culture has been redefined over recent years. There is today a traded culture, it is the one which is being globalizable. This is a type of cultural object which refers to human experiences. According to some, a war is now being fought between this globalized, mercantilized culture and local culture in the anthropological sense. But this would be the most absurd way of posing the problem, because it means we would have to choose between Disneyland and Ayatollahs. Culture, when hemmed in, is stifled and dies. Culture knows no borders.”

             The real issue, according to Mr Serres, is that of cultural space: “This space is complex and different for each and every one of us, full of obstacles, with many connections. There is a personal identity card which is the cultural singularity of each individual who has undertaken a specific journey in this textured space. Culture is the invention - based on a given point - of a path which, little by little, brings us from one neighbourhood to another, leads us on a journey, to the discovery that there are other cultures. These cultures are not at all endangered by the Net because the Net is not a global space, it too is strewn with obstacles. Culture is based on the decision of each one of us. We can say ‘No, I am not of this culture.’ I am optimistic, real culture is not endangered. We are living through a considerable transformation of the cognitive subject, of objective science and of collective culture,” he concluded.

 

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