Liquid Modernity: the theory of the affordances

Abstract. The information technologies permeate the whole globe, modernity becomes liquid, according to the famous definition of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. The modern individual has begun to suffer from more or less concealed forms of anomie, that is to say of a lack of rules and fixed points in a universe of values that seems to be in full decay and devoid of guidelines. The social affordances, theorized by the cognitive psychologist JJ Gibson, can be useful for orienting in a reality that has lost the ideological points of reference of the past, but often it is not possible to prevent the modern individual from navigating in a liquid universe in which the points of reference and the walls seem impenetrable. The societies of the past are incorporated by post-modernity, but the residues of archaic and pre-modern societies, the so-called "survivals" (as ethnologists and anthropologists indicate) continue to remain around us and our micro and macro-cosm. [Keywords: Information Technology, Anomie, Web, Affordance, Liquid Modernity, Global Village, Survivals]