44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World

by Bauman, Zygmunt

• ISBN13: 9780745650579
• ISBN10: 0745650570
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-21
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

This liquid modern world of ours, like all liquids, cannot stand still and keep its shape for long. Everything keeps changing - the fashions we follow, the events that intermittently catch our attention, the things we dream of and things we fear. And we, the inhabitants of this world in flux, feel the need to adjust to its tempo by being ls"flexible' and constantly ready to change. We want to know what is going on and what is likely to happen, but what we get is an avalanche of information that threatens to overwhelm us.How are we to sift the information that really matters from the heaps of useless and irrelevant rubbish? How are we to derive meaningful messages from senseless noise? We face the daunting task of trying to distinguish the important from the insubstantial, distil the things that matter from false alarms and flashes in the pan. Nothing escapes scrutiny so stubbornly as the ordinary things of everyday life, hiding in the light of deceptive and misleading familiarity. To turn them into objects of attention and scrutiny, they must first be torn out from that daily routine: the apparently familiar must be made strange. This is precisely what Zygmunt Bauman seeks to do in these 44 letters: each tells a story drawn from ordinary lives, but tells it in order to reveal an extraordinariness that we might otherwise overlook.Arresting, revealing, disconcerting, these snapshots of life by the most brilliant analyst of our liquid modern world will appeal to a wide readership.

Author Biography

Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds.

Table of Contents

On writing letters - from a liquid modern world	p. 1
Crowded solitude	p. 6
Parents and children conversing	p. 10
Offline, online	p. 14
As the birds do	p. 18
Virtual sex	p. 22
Strange adventures of privacy (1)	p. 26
Strange adventures of privacy (2)	p. 30
Strange adventures of privacy (3)	p. 34
Parents and children	p. 38
Teenager spending	p. 42
Stalking the Y generation	p. 46
Freedom's false dawn	p. 50
The arrival of child-women	p. 54
It is the eyelash's turn	p. 58
Fashion, or being on the move	p. 62
Consumerism is not just about consumption	p. 67
Whatever happened to the cultural elite	p. 71
Drugs and diseases	p. 75
Swine flu and other reasons to panic	p. 79
Health and inequality	p. 83
Be warned	p. 87
The world inhospitable to education? (part 1)	p. 91
The world inhospitable to education? (part 2)	p. 95
The world inhospitable to education? (part 3)	p. 99
Ghosts of New Years past and New Years to come	p. 102
Predicting the unpredictable	p. 106
Calculating the incalculable	p. 111
Phobia's twisted trajectories	p. 115
Interregnum	p. 119
Whence the superhuman force - and what for?	p. 123
Back home, you men?	p. 128
Escape from crisis	p. 132
Is there an end to depression?	p. 136
Who says you have to live by the rules?	p. 141
The phenomenon of Barack Obama	p. 146
Culture in a globalized city	p. 149
The voice of Lorna's silence	p. 153
Strangers are dangers… Are they, indeed?	p. 157
Tribes and skies	p. 163
Drawing boundaries	p. 167
How good people turn evil	p. 172
Fate and character	p. 178
Albert Camus, or: I rebel, therefore we exist…	p. 182
Notes	p. 186
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