Blake's Big Brother

Log on, hook up, chill out. Welcome to the third industrial revolution, where the internet, the mobile phone and the personal computer are as revolutionary a force in 2004 as steam power in 1804 or the motor car in 1904. The 20th-century rulebook is being rewritten by split-second movements of capital made possible by global networks.

Yet both the first and second industrial revolutions were associated not just with economic change but with a cultural transformation - so where's ours? In 1804, Wordsworth was putting the finishing touches to the Prelude, a landmark in a Romantic movement that was strongly influenced by the French revolution, and a century later, in the year after the first flight by the Wright brothers, James Joyce was leaving Ireland on a personal odyssey that would lead to the remaking of the novel.

If we are in the throes of a third industrial revolution, we might expect signs of cultural ferment to be all around. But the age of the worldwide web has yet to produce iconoclastic figures to stand alongside a Beethoven or Proust, or it's hard to spot them amid a tidal wave of vapidity: the Hollywood remakes and sequels, the reality TV shows, the wall-to-wall sex and violence that have long ceased to shock. Big Brother may be an accurate manifestation of popular culture in the early 21st century, but as a seminal cultural event it is hard to equate with Blake's Songs of Innocence or Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.

When Marlon Brando died last week, the critics were pretty much agreed: he was the greatest screen actor of his generation but stopped being a serious artistic force decades ago. Brando's pomp began with his first film, The Men, in 1950, and ended with Last Tango in Paris, in 1973, marking the postwar golden age that saw the full flowering of the second industrial revolution. Brando went where actors had never been before. He brought modernism to the cinema in the way Le Corbusier brought it to architecture. We know what happened to Brando after 1973. He got old. He got flabby. He got lost somewhere along the line. He ran out of steam at the same time as the economic boom of the third quarter of the 20th century also lost its puff and created the space for what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called a period of creative destruction.

Clearly, there's been plenty of destruction; the question is whether there has been much creativity, and if not, why not. Perhaps it was just a fluke that past periods of structural economic change coincided with revolutionary movements in the arts. Perhaps the old forms - the novel, the symphony and so on - have been pushed as far as they can be.

Let's assume, though, that the premise is right and that there is a symbiotic relationship between cultural and economic change. In that case, there are any number of theories to explain what might be going on. The first is that we are not seeing a cultural renaissance because we are not really going through an industrial revolution to match those of the past. Robert Gordon, from Northwestern University, Illinois, argues that the "new economy" does not match up in significance to the clusters of innovations that arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century - electricity, motor and air transport, motion pictures, radio and indoor plumbing. These, Gordon says, brought real changes to the lives of ordinary people - and the IT revolution hasn't. If the economic change has not been profound, we should not perhaps expect cultural change to be profound either.

A variation on this theme is that the IT revolution is merely the advance guard of deeper economic change to come with the exploitation of biotechnology. The mapping of the human genome, it is said, marks a breakthrough with as much significance as the printing press or the understanding of the subconscious. Be patient, in other words, the times they are a'changing, but more slowly than we think. It did, after all, take at least half a century for the technological advances of the second industrial age to ripen: governments had to build highways and there had to be a drift from city centres to the suburbs to exploit the car's potential. The phonograph and electricity were necessary conditions for rock'n'roll, but they were not sufficient to explain what happened to popular music in the 50s, the first time there was a generation of teenagers with money and attitude.

A third possibility is that the debate is dominated by crusty old elitists forever banging on about Monet and Bartok but oblivious to the vibrancy of a new culture that has grown up with, and in opposition to, the changes we loosely call globalisation. There is, in other words, a yearning for a golden age that never was, and a failure to see that every era has its fair share of cultural dross.

A fourth is that the debate is dominated not just by crusty old elitists, but crusty old western elitists whose obsessive belief that Europe and North America will be the fount of cultural renewal is belied by the fact that the real action is happening at the front line of globalisation. The Big Mac societies of the west - soft, complacent and decadent - get the culture they deserve; meanwhile there's plenty of cutting edge stuff coming out of Latin America, Africa and Asia. If, as seems certain, China and India are about to become the power house economies of the 21st century, it makes sense to look to Beijing and New Delhi rather than Paris and New York.

One difficulty with this theory is its presumption that the cultures of the developing world will be allowed to bloom in a heterogeneous world rather than being trampled on by a one-size-fits-all western global model. Far from encouraging diversity, globalisation has been the triumph of the corporate machine; of albums bulked up with out-takes to suit the CD format, of safety-first film producers pumping out sequels, of battery-production chick lit. It is perhaps something when Paul McCartney is headlining Glastonbury at 62, and when the need to fill hundreds of digital channels underlines the truth of the Bruce Springsteen song 57 Channels (and Nothing On). Unless you want 57 different DIY makeovers.

That's an exaggerated view, of course. There is plenty of good stuff to make up for the lacklustre. The question, though, is if anything is smashing through the barriers into uncharted territory. If not, as is arguable, a final hypothesis is that the reason has as much to do with the politics of globalisation as its economics.

Nowhere is there much evidence of the progressive changes that came with the first two industrial revolutions - the decline of absolutism, the pressure for the franchise, the advent of mass democracy. To the extent that globalisation has been associated with political transformation, it has been a reactionary concentration of power in the hands of a rich elite. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the triumph of the multinational has spawned a pallid, deracinated culture. As Bob Dylan once said, money doesn't talk - it swears.

Larry Elliott is the Guardian's economics editor