I’m rereading some chapters from various Jeremy Rifkin’s books (in particular “The Age of Access”) and the first thought which came to my mind was about the accent on the potential loss of culture that network society could raise.
A particular emphasis is placed on the difference between economical transactions and cultural events: in an industrial society, according to Rifkin’s ideas, everybody is able to divide purchasable goods from nonmaterial, and so noncommercial, ones. Any object belonging to the former category can seldom be considered a cultural product, instaed elements which price is quite difficult to be negotiated, seem to belong to a non-economical world, a virtual place where everybody is led to satisfy the other’s needs without expecting a material (transactional) reward.
In other words a network society should be considered not as a concrete evolution of a previous, and therefore industrial, one, but mainly as compromise: we renounce to only “commercial-free” part of our lives in order to gain a complete connection with other people, companies and services. However, with a sharper look, it’s rather easy to discover that a potential new existential approach, is in point of fact only a different way to consider any cultural expression.
The line of demarcation between commercial goods and creativity works was needed in order to set indirectly a price for entities always qualified as free of any charge; instaed, as in a network society the only “real” primary good is information, there’s no need of equivalent product fit to be exchange in a market. A culture-oriented work can be directly sold in order to earn both material (always necessary) goods and further accesses to other network services.
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