What is the fifth estate and why does it matter?: digitisation, globalisation, and neoliberalism and their part in the creation of a rapidly changing world

ABSTRACT

On the National Film and Sound Archive website there is a claim that states ‘the 21st century would see the emergence of an equally important Fifth Estate – the internet and World Wide Web’. By the 1980s, a very particular political ideology had begun to dominate policy decisions worldwide. It was driven by the ‘assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market’. However, while this largely utopian project began to cement itself in many world leaders’ thinking, and of course the actions that sprang from that thinking, it gave rise to a more pragmatic ‘political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’ (Harvey 2007, p.). With neoliberalism riding on the back of globalisation and digitisation, these events in total have heralded a radically new world which is necessary to understand. Why is this the case? A recent study by Deloittes set out ‘the magnitude of digital disruption across 18 major industries tracked in Australia by the Bureau of Statistics’. In sum, these changes raise a simple yet very profound question; ‘How did we get here?’

KEYWORDS:

• Fifth estate
• digitisation
• globalisation
• neoliberalism
• innovation

Acknowledgements

The research this paper has been drawn from has been made possible by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project grant, Creativity and Cultural Production in the Hunter: An Applied Ethnographic Study of New Entrepreneurial Systems in the Creative Industries, undertaken in collaboration with TechnicaCPT and Newcastle Now.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [Grant Number: LP130100348].