Principal Ongoing Mutations of Cultural and Informational Industries

Abstract

The "mutations of cultural, informational, and communications industries" research programFor over three decades, a group of scholars has developed the Cultural Industries School. 1 Some of the key fi gures, main contours, and diffusion of this school, especially in Europe, Latin America, and parts of Canada, are outlined well enough in the Introduction and in Chapter 2, so they do not need to be repeated here.Instead, this chapter provides an update on a collective research program organized by practitioners of this approach in 2004 at a seminar at MSH Paris Nord.Its participants call this research program "Mutations des CICI" or, translated into English, "Mutations of Cultural, Informational, and Communications Industries."This research project is the next step in a trajectory of research that others and I have carried out for many years under the framework of the cultural industries approach.The goal is to grasp the contemporary mutations affecting the cultural, information, and communications industries.Sometime in the future, we also intend to examine whether it makes sense to distinguish between the now fashionable notion of the creative industries and our focus on the cultural industries.For the time being, however, it can safely be said that we are skeptical that much would be gained by a change in nomenclature at this time.Our current approach refl ects the reality that, intellectually, the conditions in the humanities and social science research remain unsettled.Furthermore, our "objects of study" are likewise in a heightened state of fl ux.Refl ecting this unsettled state of affairs, it is necessary to indicate that the task in front of us is a daunting one and can only be partial and tentative in the conclusions that it draws.The temporality of the phenomena under study is too quick to do otherwise.In other words, things are far from complete, and to proceed otherwise would impose a false sense of surety on the insights that we do offer.Media professionals, industrialists, and decision makers in the public sphere, of course, would like faster answers, but this is simply not possible, at least

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