Abstract
Contemporary society is currently undergoing milestone transformations. Many are the signs that modernity is moving into the background, no longer the dominant form of social order. This phase of decline is connected to numerous problems: a sense of uncertainty, a normative crisis, or, in other words, a state of anomie. The question therefore arises as to what comes next. If anomie is perceived as an illness, then three further scenarios are possible: the end of the world, crisis as a permanent state of affairs, or a healthy “recovery” which would entail the emergence and stabilization of a new type of society. This article presents all three of these variants: a society scattered across a network form of social order, a social order based upon a new type of community, and an order which, on a broad scale, incorporates nonhuman objects within human societies.
Highlights
Contemporary society finds itself in a phase involving diverse, abrupt, and far‐reaching changes; it appears that modernity is experiencing either a collapse or an extensive reformulation
Modernity has been the social order since this form was born in the West at the end of the 18th century as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution as well as political revolutions: the French and American (Sztompka 2003: 493)
The current individualization assumes autonomous creation of identity by an individual, regardless of the social structures in which he or she is entwined; the building blocks in this process progressively include more patterns of consumption, information, and diverse cultural contents
Summary
Contemporary society is currently undergoing milestone transformations. Many are the signs that modernity is moving into the background, no longer the dominant form of social order. Traditional industry and manufacturing could only produce less than the desired number of consumer goods; analogue media offered a limited number of print periodicals and telecommunications channels; customary norms were still so anchored as to impede real choices of an employment career (for instance, women were often precluded from undertaking education and work); physical transportation around the world was so slow as to render selection of another place to live much less than free; and so on Once those constraints were lifted (especially as a result of technological achievements) options of all ilk bourgeoned exponentially, choices including ways of life, products, information, ideas, viewpoints, tastes, social roles, professional careers, interests. As explicated above, as a conglomerate of social actions or as a field of interpersonal relations continuously changing, the expiration of society would mean the expiration of the entire human race This is not, an impossible scenario, especially if we consider the risk of an ecological catastrophe or nuclear war, which are foreseeable (if distant) consequences of modernity. Sociology would need to struggle with descriptions of this new social order and the nature of the changes underway, but the discipline would need to reformulate itself
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