Luiss Open: Welcome to the era of the plausible. Because technology has definitively merged the real and the virtual.
When Zygmunt Bauman wrote about a liquid society, he had perfectly grasped the new social reality as people perceived it, so much so that his books became true bestsellers, selling worldwide. Even when we say that new technologies now define us better than social and economic relationships, we tap into a “common feeling,” entering the perceptual dimension of liquid, “amoral” individualism. However, this dimension increasingly diverges from how “things” actually are and how they evolve in contemporary society.
Technology is a social dimension that must be taken into serious consideration following the information and communication revolution of the 1990s (and already in the mid-1980s for a small, almost entirely Californian elite). The sense of connection – not the dreams, for now utopian, of collective or inter-connective intelligence – has become a primary instinct of ours, which we systematically prioritize over face-to-face situations and relationships. The sense of connection is now a system that runs through our minds. It's a sign, important evidence that for about two billion people, the merging of the real and the virtual is giving rise to a new mindset.
The rise of a new mindset that uses technology as a tool for individual empowerment doesn’t mean, however, that other dimensions—such as the socio-economic one or the civic one, tied to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship—have vanished. They have faded, losing their value in a holistic view of global society. Individuals perceive them less because contextual factors tend to collapse in technological relational networks, but they are far from being unexperienced.
Following Weber's vision, a multidimensional view of world society remains valid. Today, the social individual is shaped by economic, social, civic, institutional, and technological forces, through which they construct multiple and individual moral and cultural perspectives. The world sees technology as a powerful new force, the driver of a new social order.