44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World (PDF)

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 '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.