Series Editor
Fabrice Papy
Edited by
Jean-Pierre Chamoux
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
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© ISTE Ltd 2019
The rights of Jean-Pierre Chamoux to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018960340
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-191-8
Data telecommunications and digital processing are omnipresent in today’s society. Administrations, businesses and even leisure activities produce, disseminate and exploit data related to human activity and trade. These data, the raw material of information industries, are vital for our society. This is why our era can rightly be called the “digital era”.
Many experts were consulted prior to producing this series. The main idea took three years to prepare. The overall content, which was finished at the beginning of 2016, includes three successive volumes. This collective work is a trilogy that aims to describe and understand the technical, economic and social phenomena that result from widespread use of the Internet, a digital network that has been present everywhere since the end of the 20th Century.
The first volume summarizes the state of play and issues raised by the enormous amount of data that accompany human activities: demographic, biological, physical, geographical, political, industrial, economic and environmental data. These data feeds into records, inspires people, guides their businesses and even their countries. The first volume sheds light on the practical, technical and methodological advances that are associated with the Internet and big data.
This second volume explores how and why the digital era is transforming commercial trade and interpersonal relations, as well as our living conditions. How are the media, commerce and trade evolving? How is wealth formed and transmitted? What causes the digital wave in economic and social life described in the first volume? According to Adam Smith, the “wealth of nations”1 has been the core of political economy; is it shattered or transformed? This second volume emphasizes that the new economy is not stable. Its social dimension is still unclear. But thinking is progressing: didn’t it take a good century for the political economy to adapt to industrial society? Why wouldn’t it be the same for a knowledge-based society to be delivered, one that even futurists in the 1970s2 had already announced?
The third volume attempts to summarize the questions that the digital age suggests to our contemporaries: questions about society, interests and politics, which are partly mentioned in the first two volumes, are reformulated and developed in the last volume in order to encourage the reader to reflect and contribute to the debate on the “issues of the century”, as Ellul said in 19543. A debate that will hopefully help us understand the digital society that is being built before our very eyes; perhaps it will help us to get the best and not the worst out of it…
This series is based on the work competent, attentive and precise specialists. The authors wrote freely, as they should; they inserted their texts within the proposed outline. We owe them a great debt of gratitude. May they be sincerely thanked here for their scholarly assistance. As for any shortcomings, as is customary, only the project coordinator will be accountable4.