Born Liquid by Zygmunt Bauman Thomas Leoncini & Thomas Leoncini

Author:Zygmunt Bauman,Thomas Leoncini & Thomas Leoncini
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509530670
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

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Transformations of sex and dating

Declining taboos in the era of finding love online

Thomas Leoncini:

We regret the past only because we know we can’t go back there. Practically every day you hear someone talking about the good old days as being ‘fairer’ – a time when things were as they should be. And then you go to the bar or glance at a newspaper, and you find a recurrent theme in all these non-places:9 youngsters aren’t enjoying their youth, because of the Internet and smartphones. Everyone’s ready to accuse them of being constantly online, always looking at their phones, of carrying with them what is, by definition, the most modern and liquid non-place (the web) and of living in a pocket limbo. It’s a place that doesn’t exist, where a steady stream of relationships is created, but they too are non-existent: popular legend has it, for instance, that when two youngsters with smartphones actually meet, they talk for a bit and then they go on staring into their phones, building parallel digital universes. Yet, today’s kids are just like we were. With a few differences: we grew up chatting on the home phone, and they’ve grown up at home on their mobile phones! Although, if you think about it, that’s not absolutely true. When I was fifteen, it had just become trendy to take a mobile phone into school (it cost over 400,000 lire for a ‘portable’ phone that was so cumbersome it would only fit into a large pocket; once I remember putting one in the front pocket of my jeans and I found the antenna poking out above my shoes). We also spent the day glued to the phone screen, and some of you may even remember why. Because we received a token call. These one-ring calls were completely undervalued by the media in the early 2000s, but they had the same impact then as WhatsApp for youngsters today. If you fancied a girl, first of all you had to make sure she had a phone, then you had to barter something to get her number, and lastly – and most importantly – you gave her a call, letting her phone ring just once. If nothing happened after that, then the girl was probably one of those who ‘was a bit up herself’ (we used that phrase without understanding it, but we liked it). Then you gave her another call, but not too many – that would be over the top and you’d end up being insulted by her boyfriend. With luck, a text message would pop up, one that had been eagerly anticipated and could make your summer come alive simply because it brought with it an unexpected waft of fresh air. And do you know what it said? Quite simply: ‘Who are you?’ That’s how you knew what sort she was; and you had to choose whether to tell the truth or pretend to be someone else, even if you could be sure that, having received the

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