Public knowledge cultures

Abstract

This article first reviews claims for the knowledge economy in terms of excludability, rivalry, and transparency indicating the way that digital goods behave differently from other commodities. In the second section it discusses the theory of 'public knowledge cultures' starting from the primacy of practice based on Marx, Wittgenstein and Heidegger and what it means to build such cultures in the age of so-called knowledge capitalism. In the final section we canvas the notion of 'cultural knowledge economy' as a composite term trading on notions of 'cultural knowledge', 'knowledge as culture' and 'knowledge cultures', as well as the now accepted term 'knowledge economy' and the idea of 'cultural economy' employed as an approach similar to political economy.