Goodbye liquid society. Welcome gaseous society.
In the last pages of my book Cultura Snack (La Marca, 2020) I introduced a hypothesis: the liquid metaphor, which was so successful since the publication of Liquid Modernity (Bauman, 1999), is no longer the best one when it comes to describe contemporary social life and culture. Let’s recap: Bauman was interested in the passage from solid to liquid society, a world where “the greatest concern of our social and individual life is how to prevent things from becoming fixed, that they are so solid that they cannot change in the future . We do not believe that there are definitive solutions and not only that: we do not like them”. This loss of solidity of Modernity was already present in postmodern reflection, for example in works such as All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, a book written by Marshall Berman between 1971 and 1981 and published in 1982.
Liquid Modernity
Zygmunt Bauman applied the liquid metaphor to every type of relationship or social process, from love relationships to the crisis of 40 years, to politics, art and education. The “liquidity” appeared in all aspects of life, in material objects, in relationships with people and in “the relationship we have with ourselves, how we evaluate ourselves, what image we have of our person, what ambition we allow to guide us. Everything changes from one moment to another, we are aware that we are changeable and therefore we are afraid to fix anything forever”. When the State or companies ask people to be flexible, that means that they want “you to be not committed to anything forever, but ready to change the tune, the mind, at any moment in which it is required. This creates a liquid situation. Like a liquid in a glass, in which the slightest push changes the shape of the water. And this is everywhere”(Interview with Justo Barranco in La Vanguardia, 2017).
Metaphors are useful for thinking. In this case, thinking about society and culture in liquid terms undoubtedly served to represent a type of Modernity that, without renouncing the linear development of progress, adopted malleable and less rigid forms. The liquid metaphor is mobile (A > B), dynamic (“we cannot bathe twice in the same river”) and, put to play with the concepts, it can include “overflow” movements (a society that goes beyond its institutions it is like a river coming out of its channel) or “turbulences”. However, the very idea of a liquid flow is impregnated with a conception of linearity, of “going to a place”, which has little to do with the reality we live in the 21st century.
The new media ecosystem
As I wrote in Cultura Snack, years ago people used to spend a lot of time in few media. The rhythms of life and, therefore, of media consumption, were different, and compared to today, they flowed in slow motion. Before, there was time to calmly read the newspaper, listen to the radio several hours a day and, especially at night, gather the family in front of the TV totem. Television was precisely the hegemonic medium: like pasta in Italy or rice in China, television dominated the media diet of most societies. When Marshall McLuhan talked about the “global village” he was referring precisely to that, to the centrality of broadcasting in the daily lives of the inhabitants of planet Earth.
The irruption of digital networks had profound effects on the media ecology and on the media diet of the subjects. The network, more than a medium, is a metamedium that generated, and does not stop generating, new experiences and forms of communication. Facebook and Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube, the banner and blogs, webisodes and recaps were born on the web. It is in this digital universe where most of the new forms of communication are created, tested and legitimized. This media environment is the primordial broth of new short textual formats and, at the same time, of the transmedia mega-stories that often give a new meaning to these fragments.
The gaseous hypothesis
The explosion of snack culture (with all the collateral concepts that it implies and that I analyze in the book: brevity, miniaturization, transience, fractality, fragmentation, remixability, infoxication, mobility, speed) could be considered the breeding ground of an “original” cultural form that emerges from the new media ecology. The fragmentation and speed of the video clips, which surprised analysts and intellectuals in the last decades of the 20th century, was only the prelude to a textuality that is taking the cult of brevity to its last consequences. Snack culture, from this point of view, is presented as an even more crazed, recombinational and accelerated space that leaves behind the golden age of neotelevision (Umberto Eco) and announces a new cultural configuration. Snack culture as something that comes after postmodernism (afterpost). The liquid metaphor, with all the respect that Bauman’s approach deserves, is no longer enough: nano-contents (and subjects with them) shoot out like molecules in a gaseous state and collide with each other forming an endless textual carambole.
One of the characteristics of the new media ecology is the multiplication of actors, texts, technologies, practices, and the relationships they maintain among themselves. In short, we are in front of a more complex ecosystem where small changes (the introduction of a technology, the appearance of a new format or even a meme) can generate transformations that go from one end of that ecosystem to another. But not just communication: the entire cultural life of Homo Sapiens has become more and more complex. And of global reach. The coronavirus, that biological meme, is a good example of how something very small can have catastrophic effects on a large scale.
The liquid metaphor leads us to think of “flows” that run through their channels, move from one place to another following the orography and sometimes overflow their shores. That river was modernity. I am convinced that contemporary culture is best represented through a gaseous metaphor where millions of crazed molecules collide and bounce off each other.
Future metaphors
Metaphors are useful for thinking. If we adopt the gaseous metaphor, we can go further and think that social life goes through solid phases, that is, moments where change slows down and the consolidation and reproduction of what already exists is privileged; liquid phases, where collective displacements and transformations take place oriented towards a great shared objective; and gaseous phases where what reigns is hybridization, chaos, indeterminacy and uncertainty. Nor is it to rule out that while some societies are immersed in one phase, others are better explained through another metaphor.
Finally, I believe that we should not ignore the investigations that point to the existence of other forms of matter (science has already accepted the existence of the “plasma state”, a fourth state beyond the solid, liquid and gaseous) or studies on the states of water. Gerald Pollak’s book Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid & Vapor goes along this line of thought.
Metaphors, with all their limitations, are one of the fundamental tools that social sciences have when it comes to making sense of the world around us. But we must be careful: metaphors can also solidify and become an obstacle to thought, so sometimes it is convenient to let them go or, much better, confront them with others as if they were gaseous particles to create new metaphors.
