I.2. Digital technology, Big Data and societal transformations

By mobilizing a socio-historical approach characteristic of all his work, Armand Mattelart (Chapter 1) recalls that our societies have always been governed by numbers as soon as mathematics became a model of reasoning and action. It was at the time of the scientific revolution, during the 17th and 18th Centuries, that the thought of the quantifiable and measurable became the prototype of any true discourse in the West. However, it was only in the 19th Century that the “calculable individual” was born, with the development of statistics and probabilities. Then cybernetics arrived, with the idea of governing human beings by machines that are supposedly more rational. At the same time, the visibility of the panoptic architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham and conceptualized by Michel Foucault gave way to the new invisibility of current surveillance. Voluntarily or not, we are revealing a great deal of information that is now considered massive data aggregates, or Big Data, the term (Big Data Big Brother) to remind us that this is also about surveillance. Nevertheless, today, just as in the past, numbers can be mobilized for the purpose of surveillance and control but just as much they can contribute to progress – for example in the health sector when there is a risk of a pandemic. Therefore a factor of alienation, and also a possible tool for the emancipation of the other, hence the relevance of mobilizing the dialectical method (Ollman 2003). The risk, Mattelart believes, is that ultimately, only numbers would matter in decision-making in this new data-driven form of governmentality.

Megadata also contribute, says Fabien Richert (Chapter 2), to the colonization of the populated world. From now on, taking a growing place in our societies, they testify to the extent taken by the process of systematically decoding the social flows that have so far managed to escape capitalism. We are in a process of cold rationalization here, very far from all forms of singularity. In a way, Big Data collected on all facets of our daily lives tends to participate more than ever in the omnimarketing of the world (Latouche 1997). Finally, Richert asks, does digital labor itself reduce the individual to a set of partial and abstract functions? Here, we are in a new phase of consolidating Taylorism, where the scientific organization of work, Big Data and its algorithmic treatment is spreading in the ensemble of our activities.

Yanita Andonova (Chapter 3) examines how DICTs affect managerial practices, including human resources practices in contemporary organizations. She notes that, in the discourse, a vast set of mechanisms is mobilized in order to refer to the implementation of “flexible”, “collaborative” and “transparent” organizational forms. However, these discourses are also accompanied by the implementation of practices that are based in particular on algorithmic applications, so much so that we are now talking about algorithmic management.

In combination with the practice of micro-targeting, algorithms are also mobilized in the constitution of political discourse and, beyond that, in the very development of political communication, as stated by Samuel Cossette (Chapter 4). This sector is increasingly characterized by automation, industrialization and hyper-personalization in the way citizens are targeted through algorithmic processes. In this respect, in the absence of a revolution, there are still significant transformations that must be taken into account.

A growing proportion of cultural practices, whether in literature, the performing arts, music, cinema, video games or museums, are themselves the subject of digital exploitation as part of Big Data, as pointed out by Robert Panico and Geneviève Vidal (Chapter 5). To support their thesis, they rely on empirical work carried out in the museum sector, which disseminates content and resources in a context of social acceptance, understood, on the one hand, in terms of an injunction to permanent and invasive digital innovation and, on the other hand, in terms of the use of surveillance and digital control devices.

Surveillance can help to challenge the notion of privacy, or at least to review what can be understood by this term. Julien Rossi (Chapter 6) develops the hypothesis that the very conception of this notion has changed between the Ancients and the Moderns. While traditionally there has been a clear and unambiguous separation between public and private, from now on, attachment to privacy would be more a matter of controlling information about oneself and its circulation in different contexts, as Helen Nissenbaum (2010) attests. The evolution of the meaning of this notion relates to the place in our daily lives progressively taken by computers since the 1960s. In this respect, the process of digitalizing society would be in certain continuity with that of social computerization.

Behind these cultural and communicational practices, Rémy Rouge (Chapter 7) reminds us, are large companies such as Facebook and Google, which provide media that favor the expression of subjectivity in digital practice precisely at a time when identity issues are ever more important in our societies. However, he adds that the services that are in place allow their managers to always produce more data with high market value and, therefore, likely participate in their valorisation on the financial markets. However, the issue of disclosing a great deal of data to the main economic and political actors, starting with GAFAM and national security agencies, does not seem to be a major issue for citizens (Kwok-Choon and George 2017).

I.3. Digital technology and changes in the cultural and communication industries

Who precisely are the social actors who are setting up this digitalization of the world? The acronym GAFAM refers to the corporate names of some of the most powerful companies on the planet and, in addition, to the strong symbols of the forms currently taken by capitalism: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These transnationals, all Western, and, more precisely, American, born on the west coast of the country, share a common point, namely the fact that their colossal profits are largely based on the large amount of data they collect and process tirelessly (Smyrnaios 2017) as well as on the massive use of advertising. However, as they accumulate data and develop an economy based on them, their very way of operating appears very opaque, hence the importance of working on them, just as it is now interesting to focus our attention on companies from China, such as BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi), which are probably the only alternatives to GAFAM (Mosco 2017).

Maxime Ouellet (Chapter 8) contributes to the study of the new giants of the communications industry in his analysis of Facebook’s strategy. We are now in a capitalist regime based on the domination of a few corporations in the formation of an oligopoly far removed from a competitive market regime. The textbook case of Facebook is a good example, according to Ouellet, of the fact that accumulation within advanced capitalism, an expression he prefers to that of digital capitalism, is based on the ability to accumulate from a “symbolic monopoly rent”. The process of capital accumulation does not consist so much here in the accumulation of material wealth as in the extra-economic mechanisms of a “symbolic quantification of power”. While profit formation remains important, for a company, it is first and foremost a matter of maximizing its ability to accumulate power.

But what are these companies doing? They mainly design digital intermediation platforms, says Jacob Matthews (Chapter 9), who focuses on their proliferation not only in the culture, information and communication sectors, which are of particular interest to us, but also far beyond, starting with health, personal services (care) and tourism. These platforms are both, and inseparably, institutions of ideological production and instruments of work organization and management. Matthews tells us that we can envisage that managers, freelancers and project leaders are all users of these platforms, certainly in different social positions, but all in the service of financial capital, which is taking up an ever-increasing share of the value produced and, in these specific cases, in the name of a supposed “collaborative economy”.

Philippe Bouquillion (Chapter 10) focuses more specifically on audiovisual platforms that contribute to the development of the so-called bypass television. He sees it as a new stage in cultural globalization and renewed confrontations between cultural and communication industries. He had already highlighted this opposition in his book Les industries de la culture et de la communication. Les stratégies du capitalisme a little more than 10 years ago (2008), but this confrontation appears more intense than ever before, as the major groups in the communication industries increasingly try to control the downstream of cultural sectors, which implies, for example, a permanent increase in production. Nevertheless, content is obviously still necessary for these companies, and we see, for example, that Netflix invests significantly in audiovisual production (Perticoz, 2019). The analysis by Bouquillion shows that we are witnessing a proliferation of cultural offerings, the arrival of new entrants, a weakening of historical actors, defensive strategies on the part of several national actors and the development of public policies that oscillate between transnational logic and a more traditional national dimension. It is clear here that the roles of platforms are not negligible in the ongoing transformation of media and culture.

Édith Laviec (Chapter 11) is within the same theoretical framework, with work in the scientific book publishing sector. She wonders how the meeting between old and new actors in this sector took place, and what are the possible consequences on the transformation of the sector. Finally, she notes that, in the region studied in France, Rhône-Alpes, the new players who have been best able to integrate into the sector work in collaboration with the “historical” publishers on the basis of a sharing of the values and knowledge of traditional trades and their challenges. Nevertheless, other players – here she refers to Amazon, Google and, to a lesser extent, Apple – have benefited from their dominant international status to enter this sector. Here we find the idea that cultural industries have always been characterized by the coexistence at different industrial channels between large companies in a dominant situation and smaller ones in a competitive situation (Huet et al. 1978).

When it comes to changes related to technological innovations, the pornography industry is always one of the first, if not the first, to seize them. We have seen it in regard to videotapes, the Internet or even printing. Today, as Arnaud Anciaux (Chapter 12) points out, digitalization plays a significant role in promoting the formation of an oligopoly of publishing and distribution on a global scale, while also allowing the development of commercial exchanges that are built on the margins of this oligopoly. The development of sexcam platforms is evidence, at least in part, of the renewal of social relations between consumers, on the one hand, and performers, on the other hand, as well as the creation of new forms of remuneration. However, this is, again, an organizational mode that is quite largely industrialized. The projected discourse, namely that of relatively low intermediation, therefore appears to be out of step with a much more complex operating mode.

On the basis of these transformations, we can ask ourselves how political actors deal with digital technology. In many countries, it seems difficult to adopt a clear and firm attitude towards actors such as Facebook, Google, Netflix and others, who play on borders in different ways and undermine the very notion of sovereignty, at a time when states see themselves first and foremost as supporters (Vedel 1999). Maud Boisnard, Destiny Tchéhouali and Michèle Rioux (Chapter 13) also believe that the transformations brought about by digital technology in the cultural industries raise fears of an imbalance between English-speaking productions intended for the world market and “local” productions, for example in Canada and Quebec, which often have difficulty achieving visibility on the Web, even on a national scale, and attracting the attention of an audience. Boisnard, Tchéhouali and Rioux invite public action to better articulate three worlds, those of trade, culture and digital technology, which evolve according to different logics.

As for Anne Bellon (Chapter 14), she has worked on the various ways in which digital technology has penetrated the French Ministry of Culture. This researcher attempted to analyze how it is seized within a public institution and, on this occasion, highlighted two competing appropriations of the term. The ministry includes, on the one hand, supporters of the instrumentalization of digital technologies in the service of traditional cultural objects as part of a policy aimed at pursuing cultural democratization, and, on the other hand, parties who would like to rethink cultural content in light of the new technical tools made available, for example by addressing cultural diversity in the context of GAFAM.

I.4. Digital technology and cultural and communicational practices

As we have seen, the term digital also refers to the growing importance of a few giant companies in all the activities of our daily lives, including in the cultural sector. But, precisely, does the resulting multiplication of communicative socio-technical devices, the ever-increasing place of promotional discourses accompanying their marketing and the appropriation both by individuals and groups not contribute to the emergence of a certain “digital culture”, especially among the youngest population (Fluckiger 2010), sometimes described as “digital natives”? On this subject, Alma Betbout (Chapter 15) discusses new youth practices in Tunisia by addressing the uses of digital social networks. The results of her survey lead her to conclude that a culture is developing – would it be better to talk about a “subculture”? – which is based on transgression in relation to traditional writing; on the use of phonetic writing with spelling errors; on participation in a Latinization of the Tunisian dialect, associated with different languages; on the mixing of numbers and letters, thus showing a desire to escape the normative; and finally on the development of invention and deciphering. All these communicative practices would strengthen the sense of these young people belonging to a youth culture and a connected community through the sharing of common references.

Young people are also the population par excellence concerned by the education sector. It so happens that Marie David (Chapter 16) was interested in how the uses of ICTs transform the academic knowledge learned. It can be seen that the students who participated in the research in France practice this knowledge collectively, through digital platforms and social networks, and that their practices modify the knowledge that is learned and thus have indirect effects on the teaching activity. However, Cathia Papi (Chapter 17) notes that in Quebec, while the place of these digital technologies appears to be constantly expanding, the education sector is often seen as a base with some resistance against this generalization of digitalization. This is not the case, at least not yet, despite the strategies and resources deployed. Papi notes that, on the one hand, teachers have rarely been trained in how to use these devices and, on the other hand, young people do not automatically transpose their familiarity with these technologies into practice in their learning activities.

When we think of culture and digital technology, it is therefore often young people who are mentioned. However, the elderly are also affected. They are confronted with various social incentives to participate in the development of a “digital culture”. By asking whether it is possible to speak of “digital acculturation”, Lucie Delias (Chapter 18) has argued that they are invited to consider incentives that take the form of normative injunctions linked to a model of “successful aging” that promotes activity and connectivity. In addition, these injunctions are supplemented by a de facto obligation to participate in the digital world induced by the dematerialization of administrative services. She concludes that members of the working classes are particularly disadvantaged in this situation.

Myriam Durocher (Chapter 19) also questions the relationship between culture and digital technology based on the notion of a “biomedicalized food culture”. This growing culture contributes to the multiplication of content aimed at informing individuals about what constitutes contemporary “healthy eating”, assessed according to its biochemical components, which are linked to the body processes that determine the intake of these nutrients. It also participates in the development of self-control practices, based on food, through socio-technical measures that promote personalized and real-time monitoring of what is consumed. It includes the notions of biopolitics and biopower developed by Michel Foucault (2004).

So much for the content of this Volume 1, which we finish with some summary elements in a short conclusion that also opens up Volume 2 of this publication.

Enjoy!