Subjects in the face of contemporary acceleration and limitlessness

Abstract

The increase in technological flows as well as their speed and acceleration are followed by the emergence of a liquid and globalized world in which real and virtual are not easy to separate and tend to be deprived of clear limits. In modernity, the construction of subjects and the very conditions of psychic and social life have been deeply distressed. Contemporary conditions are dominated by continuous flows of information that have an effect on everybody´s senses. These flows encourage – and even impose – instantaneousness and immediacy that prevent the action of thinking over time. They also have effects on lifestyles, ways of being and thinking and ways of representing oneself and the others, as well as ways of feeling and perceiving: by exerting continuous pressure on individuals, they make them lose stable criteria and the principle of limits that are tangible or at least perceptible in space and time. At the same time, these continuous flows induce individuals to unlimited types of property of themselves, while resulting on the impoverishment of innermost being: they provoke deep psychological and social insecurity and, furthermore, unprecedented types of anxiety.