Imagine waking up one day and discovering that all your non-family activities have been transformed into a "paid" experience. This is part of a fundamental shift occurring in the character of business, asserts bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin. The Age of Access looms on the horizon, a time radically different from what we know.
In the hyper-capitalist economy, the buying of things and ownership are old-fashioned ideas, while "timely" access to all kinds of services, through vast commercial networks operating in cyberspace, becomes the norm. In the future, we will buy enlightenment and play, sorrow and good cheer, and everything else.
Global travel and tourism, themed cities and theme parks, entertainment destinations, good physical fitness, fashion and cuisine, sports, music, movies and television, the virtual worlds of cyberspace, and even social causes are rapidly becoming the core of an economy that commodifies cultural resources.
Rifkin warns that to the extent that culture itself is absorbed by the economy, the only ties left to hold the social fabric together are commercial ones. The critical question posed by the book "The New Age of Access" is whether culture can survive when the commercial sphere remains the primary regulator of human life.
[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]
