Liquid Modernity

Rating:
Summary: Bound by Freedom
Review: Bauman makes a distinction between solid and the liquid modernity of his title. The book is analysis in several sections of the effect of society in Bauman's terms becoming liquid. Previously people were immersed in solid societies that produced the norms by which people lived. People could structure their lives by being members of their society and could measure their success by measuring themselves against their society's norms.

Bauman gives an account of how modernity's emphaisis on the individual has resulted in the destruction of these norms all in the name of giving freedom and self-determination to the individual. However this freedom and self-determination is in many ways illusional. Society may have restricted an individual but in many ways it enabled the indiviual by supplying the support and infrastrcture for them to live their lives. Now indviduals are are on their own. They must construct themselves from the beginning without support and as Bauman points out they must not only construct themseleves they must construct the measures that allow them to assess the meaning and success of their lives. They are bound by their own freedom.

Bauman shows how the loss of interdependency is enabled by technologies that are not dependent on proximity. Long lasting relationships and societies are built by people who have to find ways to live together and face the exigencies of their physical and ecomomic environments. Woth modern technolgy the dependence on territory is diminished and the technologially and economically enabled can simply move from one opportunity to another and are not tied to the economic fortunes of any one partcular territory. Those tied to a territory are fated to experience booms and busts with no long lasting support from society.

The result of this according to Bauman is a society of individuals who are tied only to themselves and only to the present. They construct not cathedrals to the glory fo their society but talk shows which give them comfort by showing others lost in the problems of their indviduality. Humanity has given up Notre Dame to find comfort in Jerry Springer.

Bauman produces real insights in this book that explain many aspects of modern society. However his views tend to the extereme. Even the technological elite that he describes moving from one territitory to another are in reality bound both territorialy and socially. Knoweledge is created socially and the diffusion of knowledge relies on social conventions and proxmity. Bauman's views do not account for this dimension of tacit knowedge and social norms.

Rating:
Summary: Making sense
Review: I found Bauman's book titled Globalization: The Human Consequences such an articulate description of the the way that globalisation has ravaged poor communities that I could not resist getting Liquid Modernity. I am certainly not dissappointed.

In this new book Bauman addresses the shifts in some of the large social concepts which effect human identity and our relationships with one another: emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community. Bauman makes sense for me of the way the world is speeding up for some people whilst others are becoming immobilised: of what on the one hand seems to be "progress" and on the other seems to "annihilation of human care. He is very clear about the problematic of this, among other things, and often gives hopeful hints about ways to proceed.

This book is not a light read, thank goodness - but a thorough analysis of what at times seems so bewildering.

Rating:
Summary: Making sense
Review: I found Bauman's book titled Globalization: The Human Consequences such an articulate description of the the way that globalisation has ravaged poor communities that I could not resist getting Liquid Modernity. I am certainly not dissappointed.

In this new book Bauman addresses the shifts in some of the large social concepts which effect human identity and our relationships with one another: emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community. Bauman makes sense for me of the way the world is speeding up for some people whilst others are becoming immobilised: of what on the one hand seems to be "progress" and on the other seems to "annihilation of human care. He is very clear about the problematic of this, among other things, and often gives hopeful hints about ways to proceed.

This book is not a light read, thank goodness - but a thorough analysis of what at times seems so bewildering.