How can we most usefully appropriate the rhetorics of the new economy to advance a contemporary understanding of the production and consumption of creative and informational content? Can the concept of creativity be broadened, but not so much that it becomes everything and nothing – the newest business lit fad and just as ephemeral as the rest – such that claims for its role as a driver of economic growth can be sustained? Can the analytical and research context for ‘experiential’ or ‘cultural’ consumption – core business for cultural, communications and media studies academics – be helpfully developed through new economy models? This piece takes an explicitly policy-orientated line and tendentiously tracks a genealogy and some possible preferred futures for the creative industries beyond their framing within a cultural policy problematic. I track the fate of creative and informational content as it passes across three grids of understanding: ‘culture’, ‘services’ and ‘knowledge’. These grids also serve as historical and/or possible rationales for state intervention in the creative industries as well as industry’s own understandings of their nature and role.
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