In his book Identity, Zygmunt Bauman discusses the notion of identity in the modern world. He talks about the insecurity and uncertainty of ‘liquid modernity.’ People are liquid and free-floating, but want security, however to be ‘fixed’ and ‘identified’ is impossible. In the modern world our identities are undergoing a process of continual transformation. With globalization people have weaker connections to their homeland. Bauman says the idea of identity developed from the need to belong, “One becomes aware that ‘belonging’ and ‘identity’ are not cut in rock, that they are not secured by a lifelong guarantee, that they are eminently negotiable and revocable; and that one’s own decisions, the steps one takes, the way one acts—and the determination to stick by all that—are crucial factors in both” (Bauman 11). Bauman says that identity is something that is invented rather than discovered, and that we have to build our own identities, “Few if any of us are exposed to just one ‘community of ideas and principles’ at a time, and so most of us have similar trouble with the issue of l’ipséite (coherence of whatever distinguishes us as persons)” (Bauman 13). People continually reconstruct their identities to understand the world they live in.

We can apply these ideas of liquid identity and modernity to the practice of new media. New Media is about process, reconstruction, transformation, uncertainty, the impossibility of being fixed and trying to understand the world we live in.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Call for Artists: Liquid Identities
• Class Notes Redux – Liquid Modernity
• Modernity as Post-Panoptical