Knowledge and the Digital Reinvention of Citizenship – Social Emancipation and Creative Labor in the “City of Knowledge”

Abstract

Iconomics is the political economy of icons. It is now urgent to reach a broad understanding of the technological, iconic and economic effects of contemporary digital citizenship, as well as its impacts on complementary spheres such as affectivity, narrative and labor. The iconomic phenomenology leads to the centrality of public policies in order to design and evaluate over digital platforms which are subject to a collective bias toward participation. This vision of an iconomy associated to human development policies leading to large scale opportunities in creative audiovisual markets on a global, digital basis results from 14 years of experience leading research, curatorship, consulting, cultural reachout and social learning programs and projects at the City of Knowledge Project. This review covers three aspects of the overall agenda for the digital reinvention of citizenship leveraged by creative media: the theoretical, conceptual sphere as a moment of global capitalist development; a historical review of the experiential memory of the City of Knowledge from its inception at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo to the most recent convergence to the workings of an incubator which may foster a creative ecosystem. Our concluding remarks point to the technological, theoretical and political guidelines of this emerging ecosystem, while stressing the transdisciplinar integration and social emancipation potentials open to research, extensionism and project incubation focusing on the frontiers of the creative economy.