AS a newspaper columnist, I have written quite a bit about how market forces and technological advances are conspiring in the demise of culture.

The irony is that by all accounts we are in the midst of an unprecedented cultural renaissance, which finds expression in the successful flotation of cultural enterprises, the high number of white elephant projects erected in the name of culture, and the rising prices relics can fetch when traded.

When culture is transmuted by ruthless economic metrics, its value becomes synonymous with monetary value.

Left-behind children avidly playing videos games in their village homes, skimpily clad models strutting on the catwalk and movie actresses realistically recreating bedroom intimacies - they are all making veritable contributions to cultural prosperity.

Thanks to the glorification of cultural industrialization, the formerly inscrutable and esoteric cultural concepts are being reified. They have become conspicuously noticeable.

Changchun Architectural College has modeled its new library on the American White House, complete with lounges, chandeliers and bars.

The chief librarian revealed smugly he owes his inspiration to a trip to Columbia University Library in New York City.

I have yet to pay tribute to that library, but did have a chance recently to visit the Pudong New Area Library. I have visited the Beijing National Library and the US Library of Congress, but never did I feel so humble as at the district library.

Significantly, an annual meeting for shareholders for a listed company was being held at the venue at the time of my pilgrimage.

Many are the signs of cultural degradation at the hand of market, but none compares with the systematic destruction inflicted by the powerful Internet.

In "Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back" (2011), author Robert Levine gives a cogent explanation of how the Internet threatens to destroy the culture business.

Ironically, any official discussions of culture-based industries today would sound hollow without enunciation of the determination to better promote, rather than police, the cyberspace.

All these stem from a lack of understanding of the true nature of true culture.

On the night of June 27, 1787, when Edward Gibbon finished his monumental "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" after being hard at it for 14 years, he noted that "I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame."

He returned to England the next year to oversee the publication of the volumes and enjoy their reception.

That was possible before the Internet.

Today it takes just a few seconds to download his volumes, at no cost. Would Gibbon have gambled 14 years on a book had he foreseen the Internet age duplication and transmission? Would any publisher dare to give him any advance for such a work?

The paradox today is that, as Levine observes, "Although technology has revolutionized the process of distributing books, it hasn't fundamentally changed the process of writing one."

Today it would still take Gibbon 14 years to complete his history, though it would only take a few seconds to download, share, and transmit his hefty volumes millions of times, electronically.

Struggling newspapers

Any professional content creator will tell you how the technology is bullying, harassing, and starving the content creators, be they newspaper professionals, writers, artists, or musicians.

Unfortunately, most decision makers today are so mesmerized by the way content could be shared and distributed that they totally lose sight of the plight confronting content creators.

A species of writers that have more or less adapted to the new paradigm is the chuanyue (time travel) hacks - fast-food fiction writers fantasizing about how modern heroes or heroines would fare should they live in the ancient past.

This fiction is released in installment on the Internet. The writers can still turn a good profit if they know how to sustain the readers' ephemeral interest.

However, nearly all serious newspapers are struggling for survival, as they cope with hemorrhaging revenues that are migrating to the Internet.

Before the Internet, reporters could spend days or months on an assignment. Today they are constantly reminded of Internet users' thirst for updates. Nonstop surveillance video is probably the only media that stands to survive the Internet.

Under such pressure, newspapers have to move online. But they still cannot compete with search engines and websites, which are better at copying.

As a result, advertising money tends to flow to search sites, rather than newspaper websites.

The reduced revenue forces newspapers to cut costs, and reporters.

Today only major newspapers can still maintain their own international, or national correspondents. This would certainly compromise the news gathering process.

As the book observes, traditional media firms (from the BBC to The Washing Post) provide 99 percent of the stories that blogs link to, yet these papers are losing money. Newspapers saw a 45 percent drop in ad revenue from 2006 to 2009.

The author's prescription for "fighting back" sounds optimistic, given how entrenched these technology firms have become, being hailed as emancipatory and democratic.

"Much of the enthusiasm for free media comes from mistaking the packaging for the product," the author observes.

While newspapers hire reporters to investigate, create copies, edit them, and publish them, the Internet portals do none of these but can turn a profit by simply cutting and pasting, a process no longer widely stigmatized as piracy.

Prognosis

Author Levine points out that "the real conflict online is between the media companies that fund much of the entertainment we read, see and hear and the technology firms that want to distribute their content - legally or otherwise."

What would the world be like when all traditional media have been elbowed out of business?

There would be chaos. As Levine discovers, one of the web's defining characteristics has been that no single authority is in charge of it. Anyone can publish online, and anyone can access what others publish.

The absence of any barriers and thresholds would ultimately lead to confusion, dissatisfaction and, hopefully, calls for regulation, though today any calls for regulation can be politicized as totalitarian.

In an age when tech-savvy upstarts like Google founders or iPad founders have become icons, Internet service providers would find it easy to continue to lobby against regulation - except for regulation of others.