The "experience economy"

Simon Jenkins writes in the times today:

"The money is now being made in supplying a public craving not for technology but for human experience. It lies in flesh and blood. Live is live."

Yup. The experience economy so beloved of my ex-employers The Future Foundation is booming. People are buying less stuff and spending more, much more, on attending cultural events, "enriching their lives", and having nothing more to show for it than the memory and the annecdote.
I must admit though, I've never seen it presented as a victory for real life over technology. If anything, technology is precisely why the music industry has changed. Recorded music is cheaper, gigs are more important, and, thanks to social networking, everyone that attends can talk about it and share their pictures afterwards. So, yes, although he's right that people want to pay for experiences I think he's got his argument all wrong.

Rather than viewing it as a return to real life from something false, I think it's more interesting to view it as a growth in something that has always happened. After all, there have always been people that like going to gigs, lectures, and debates - are there just more of them than before? And if so, why?

My explanation of this relies quite heavily on P Bourdieu. Very briefly, people like status and to gain that status they either have to own better stuff, know better people, or know more about culture. This was true two hundred years ago and it is true now. What has changed is that, as people have grown richer, many more people are materially satisfied and, so, turn their attention to cultural goods like holidays, meals out, concerts, and theatre. Over the last ten years more people have become culturally middle class and don't need to "have something to show" for the money they spend.

[I also think that people are looking for shared mass experiences in which people can transcend themselves and be part of something bigger. But that is another story for another day.]

If we accept that status seeking [or expression of identity - is this the same?, I think it probably is] is driving this, what is likely to happen in the next five years? Specifically:

- Do people seek status differently in a recession?

- What does status look like online (Jenkins won't like that)?

- Do young people look for status in the same way that they did in the past?

I'll pick these up over the next few posts.

Before I finish, though, I just want to mention another mistake that jenkins makes. He seems to think all futurologists are blinded by technology - now, I don't really know what he means by "futurologist" but most of the futures work I read is written by sociologists. In fact, you could say that in the past five years studies of the future have got over technology and have taken a distinctly human turn. Either Jenkins is out of date or in the excitement of the redesign the Sunday Times have accidentally re-printed his article from 2003.