Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture.

AuthorTomaselli, Michael

Joel Waldfogel. Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 321 pages. Paperback, $18.95.

In 2018, Joel Waldfogel published Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture. The University of Minnesota Applied Economics specialist centers his work around the conceptual debate of "quantity versus quality" when it comes to digital media. The author carefully examines how the creative industries, as he describes them, are facing a crisis through the ease of media creation and consumption. Waldfogel carefully constructs a seemingly multifaceted approach to his solution to the crisis caused by mass digitization of media. On the first level, the work is a response to the contemporary shift towards digitization as seen in his first chapter, The Creative Industries: Risky, Expensive, and Worth Preserving (p.1-27). On a deeper level Waldfogel argues that society should not be worried about the media companies, they will shift with society or be replaced. The center of the conversation should be the media consumers instead. Digital Renaissance is very much an anticipatory work, highlighting how the proverbial dominoes in the framework can fall to make changes in how media is presented. Like any speculative work, success is not guaranteed. While media has changed quickly since the work was published, the context of 2018 allows for the to be framed correctly to add to a multi-threaded understanding of cultural processes.

In order to accomplish these goals, Waldfogel sets his work into two phases. The first of which defines the perceived crisis as being caused by the overabundance of media circulating. One of the consequences of this is the threat to revenue caused by both digital piracy and the ease of the process to self-publish media (p.4). The author then elaborates on the argument by giving thorough surveys of industries from music, movies, television, books, and photography. The work ends the first phase responding to the state of...

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