Nada Švob-Đokić (ed.): The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe (2005)

The book The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe is a collection of papers that resulted from the postgraduate course Managing Cultural Transitions: Southeastern Europe – The Impact of Creative Industries, organized by the Department for Culture and Communication of the Institute for International Relations, Zagreb, and held at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, 8-15 May 2005. The book gathers contributions by 11 authors who analyze creative industries and cultural cooperation in South East Europe, through three chapters: Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe; Cultural Exchange and Cooperation in Southeastern Europe and Cultural Cooperation Contexts.

The creative industries or, rather, culture industries as they appeared in the Southeastern European countries, stem from the tradition of industrial and market-oriented cultural production taken to be low culture or even kitsch cultural production, undermined during the times of socialism. In the transition period these industries became more associated with the ideas of modernization and technological progress, and strongly prompted by imports of cultural consumerism based on pop cultural products. It became clearly visible that small-scale cultural industries and productions might be both economically and culturally reasonable if supported by regionalist ideas and intra-regional cultural cooperation, which might, perhaps, establish links among small and very diverse Southeastern European cultures. However, the influence of large transnational corporations, which are turning the region into a part of the global cultural market, has not yet been undermined.

In The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe authors from the region add a new dimension to this discussion and show how the Southeast European transitional societies, at best “mixed societies” undergoing different types of the modernization process, may react to challenges relating to the development of creative industries and creative economies. The authors clearly stress that in spite of numerous commonalities, the differences between countries in the region, and also within them, may still produce very different reactions to the challenge of creative industries and the markets they may be cultivating.

Collection of papers from the course
Managing Cultural Transitions: Southeastern Europe – The Impact of Creative Industries
Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, 8 – 15 May 2005
Edited by Nada Švob-Đokić
Culturelink Joint Publications Series No. 8
Institute for International Relations
Zagreb, 2005
ISBN 953-6096-37-4

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Pekka Himanen: The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (2001) [EN, DE]

“In The Hacker Ethic, Himanen is trying to understand the core of informationalism, the post-industrialist paradigm, extending the ideas of Manuel Castells’ Information Age. As an alternative to the industrial-capitalist protestant work ethic he proposes a hacker ethic as something like a cyber communitarianism. The structure of the information society is a web, which in contemporary business world manifests itself, for instance, in dynamic outsourcing and even cooperation with one’s competitors. The “knots” of such a web get activated according to the needs and opportunities.

According to Himanen, the three main features of hacker ethic are:
* enthusiastic, passionate attitude to the work that is enjoyed
* creativity, wish to realise oneself and one’s ability, often in teams that are formed spontaneously (project orientation)
* wish to share one’s skills with a community having common goals, along with the need to acquire recognition from one’s “tribe”; one is motivated by inner zeal rather than external awards: the fruits of one’s work are donated to everybody for their advances and further developments

Manuel Castells thinks that the innovations produced by hackers are the foundations of the development of the whole culture. According to Himanen, the social hackerism begins from such things as vegetarianism, whereas the opposite of it is represented by Microsoft and the licensing of computer programs. Himanen thinks that in the information society we need a radical lack of prejudice, such as he has met in philosophy lessons to children. A critical challenge of the Internet era is the ability to meet the other human being.”

Prologue by Linus Torvalds
Epilogue by Manuel Castells
Publisher Secker & Warburg, 2001
ISBN 0436205505, 9780436205507
232 pages

Wikipedia

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (English, 2001, no OCR, updated 2016-1-16)
Die Hacker Ethik und der Geist des Informations-Zeitalters (German, trans. Heike Schlatterer, 2001, updated 2016-1-16)

Niklas Luhmann: The Reality of the Mass Media (1995/2000)

“In The Reality of the Mass Media, Luhmann extends his theory of social systems — applied in his earlier works to the economy, the political system, art, religion, the sciences, and law — to an examination of the role of mass media in the construction of social reality.

Luhmann argues that the system of mass media is a set of recursive, self-referential programs of communication, whose functions are not determined by the external values of truthfulness, objectivity, or knowledge, nor by specific social interests or political directives. Rather, he contends that the system of mass media is regulated by the internal code information/noninformation, which enables the system to select its information (news) from its own environment and to communicate this information in accordance with its own reflexive criteria.

Despite its self-referential quality, Luhmann describes the mass media as one of the key cognitive systems of modern society, by means of which society constructs the illusion of its own reality. The reality of mass media, he argues, allows societies to process information without destabilizing social roles or overburdening social actors. It forms a broad reservoir (memory) of options for the future coordination of action, and it provides parameters for the stabilization of political reproduction of society, as it produces a continuous self-description of the world around which modern society can orient itself.

In his discussion of mass media, Luhmann elaborates a theory of communication in which communication is seen not as the act of a particular consciousness, nor the medium of integrative social norms, but merely the technical codes through which systemic operations arrange and perpetuate themselves.”

First published as Die Realität der Massenmedien, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995.

Translated by Kathleen Cross
Published by Stanford University Press, 2000
ISBN 0804740771, 9780804740777
154 pages

Key terms: mass media, second-order cybernetics, autopoiesis, Heinz von Foerster, autopoietic, Laws of Form, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, constructivist epistemology, Gregory Bateson, recursive, Spencer Brown, Katherine Hayles, Michel Serres, Baltasar Gracian, Amos Tversky, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, munication, Ludwig Tieck

Publisher

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