The Age of Access
How the shift from ownership
to access is transforming moder life?
As the industrialized world
sprints headlong towards an economy dominated by cyberspace, ownership is becoming an
anachronism, and markets are giving way to networks, where concepts rather than objects
are traded. In the age of access a company's greatest asset is not physical property but
intangible ideas.
Cutting edge businesses now
talk about a person's lifetime value (LTV), the theoretical measure of how much a person
is worth commercially from birth to death. Soon every aspect of our lives - travel, sport,
entertainment, health, fashion, food, and even social causes - will become part of the
experience economy, as giant media corporations like AOL/Time Warner, Pearson, Sony and
Disney exploit the digital revolution in communication to turn human culture itself into a
commodity.
Jeremy Rifkin warns of the
dangers this new form of global monopoly poses to the way we live our lives, to our
individual freedom and to the traditional values which cement human relationships. If this
is the future, can such a society survive?
312 pages