Digitalization of Society and Socio-political Issues 1

1For an Archaeology of the Cult of the Number

“Each ‘piece of news’ brings together movements of different origins and rhythms. Today’s time is a combination of yesterday, the day before yesterday and in times past.” This remark made by the historian Fernand Braudel in the 1950s about the need to free oneself from the cult of the present in order to understand the course of the world has not lost its relevance (Braudel 1958, p. 19). Quite the contrary. The digitalization of society tends to intensify the infinite race in the service of the present. It is the long duration and the simultaneous existence of different temporalities that give meaning to the trilogy I published in the 1990s: Mapping World Communication (1994), The Invention of Communication (1996) and Histoire de l’utopie planétaire (1999 – History of Planetary Utopia). The influence of the short-time view, or “presentism”, encourages us to grant a patent of novelty, and therefore of revolutionary change, to what in reality reflects structural evolutions and processes that have been going on for a very long time. This is what Nicholas Garnham (2000, p. 118), one of the pioneers of the political economy of communication and culture, also reminded us on the threshold of the millennium: “As Braudel has reminded us in relation to the flexibility of capital within a space of flows, the answers are more likely to be inscribed in the durée of capitalist development than on the Information Superhighway.” What I propose ...