Liquid society and modernity, a story that has just begun

Global communication, the Internet and social networks have imposed a new way of living. They made life easier and better, of course!!! But they also bring with them a worrying phenomenon.

What distinguished the communities of human beings from the rest of the communities of living beings has undoubtedly been as defined by anthropology, the exchange of messages and goods and of course sexuality outside of castes.

When communication was only gestural, or had no vehicles (means) to facilitate it, the life of the human being was rudimentary. Let’s say that the correlate of this in the economy was the subsistence economy, that is, a minimum production that only aimed to obtain the minimum to be able to live.

Let’s put the beginning of everything in Gutenberg and in the 15th century, in terms of communication, the great creator, with the development and discovery of the printing press, multiplied books, words and communication in a seemingly infinite leap….

Thus the newspapers arrived and the magnificent and brilliant Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1875, then the radio finally arrived the great phenomenon: television, the news agencies appeared, the fax appeared, the cell phone… and finally what we are experiencing that revolutionized everything….INTERNET.

And it brought with it a young revolution, let us remember: the first commercial email account arrived in Argentina in 1995, and cell phones and smartphones began to be widely consumed in the first decade of the 21st century. That is, it carved recent history, it is history and it is present.

But such an acceleration makes us think that it is a brilliant philosophical discovery by a Polish thinker who, from a corner of Europe, took a worrying x-ray of the Great Communication Phenomenon that we are experiencing.

This is Zygmunt Bauman (Poland, 1925 – Leeds, 2017). Two relatively recent texts, On Culture in a Liquid World and On Education in a Liquid World (both 2013), mark Bauman’s intellectual commitment thanks to his early interest in social stratification and the labor movement took broader directions by investigating the nature of modernity, placing education as a central theme within a “liquid world”, its favorite image to characterize these times we live in. Education, a worrying topic if there is one, for Bauman represents a major challenge in a changing world, with unstable and even surprising patterns of coexistence and group and individual behavior.

So, what is liquid modernity? It is an increasingly globalized, unstable society, without a fixed identity, that suffers consumerism, migration, unhealthy temptations, educational deficiencies.

The concern is that just as everything has become “liquid”, values ​​also seem to have liquefied… Thus, what is bad is not so bad and what is good is not so good. It would be like an empire of the theory of relativity, but at a social level, generalized and stylized as appropriate for the development of relationships between people.

Let’s say that value would become, in a worrying way, “disvalue.”

Modern society is so free from ties and so loose from restrictions that it emerged with power and strength due to that unstoppable freedom that recognizes no limits or barriers. Without that freedom, the phenomenon of modernity, the development of cell phones, the Internet, social networks and everything that is an indispensable part of our lives today could not have occurred.

Today the medium is no longer the message and the message no longer has anything or little to do with the media.

A new life in a new society, with new media, new channels and different interactions.

In everything, above everything, behind everything, always always, is the human being. Because for everything that happens today, there were human beings who, long ago, imagined it.

David Hume already said it

“Nothing is freer than the human imagination.” THIS STORY HAS JUST BEGINNED.

Media analyst and TV producer