Today's essential asset is the adaptation to continuous and often sudden changes: from the permanent to the ephemeral, from the expected to the unexpected, from the farthest to the nearest, from the programmed to the random.

All these accumulate on an axis of social vitality around which a global technical culture revolves - what is described in this book as "cosmopolitanism". The purpose of this book is not to analyze the structures that promote so-called "globalization" but to understand the new relationship between habits, technology, and individuation, a condition that the author calls entertainment.

Entertainment does not refer to the ancient "distraction", the idleness of the mind, but to the synchronized externalization and internalization of thought in communicative habits. The book attempts an analysis of entertainment, which clearly shows how cultural and technological change establish themselves in tangible experiential sequences that lead to the distancing from earlier forms of culture and the predominance of cosmopolitanism.

(From the presentation on the back cover of the book)