The Digital Era 3

IntroductionMores and Practices

I cannot introduce this last volume of our collaborative work without expressing my deep gratitude to all those who have contributed to it: to the contributors who have abnegated to the rules imposed by an encyclopedic and didactic ambition; to the professionals that we have approached, listened to and disturbed in order to pass on their experience and their understanding of the techniques and knowledge of the digital era; to the learned colleagues of various origins and disciplines, because of whom we have recognized, over the years and through our readings, the new and the old, the absolute and the likely and, sometimes, the true and the false.

All of them have had the patience and courtesy to help us decipher the transboundary complexity of the world in which we have been immersed for half a century, whose key data, that are sometimes invisible, can be deceptive. The project, which began more than 5 years ago, could never be completed; we are putting an end to it without regret, being well-aware of the vanity involved in this choice, which I hope we will be forgiven for! The aphorism of Frédéric Bastiat, one of the free spirits of the 19th century who is better known in the United States than in France, just as Alexis de Tocqueville was for a long time, suggests this final thought¹: for the digital world as for the economy, never forget that “behind what we see, what we don’t see also allows us to understand the real world”.

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