Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman 25 years ago spoke of "liquid modernity," a society in which everything was liquefying: personal, emotional, community and social ties were beginning to be lost. The only rule was adherence to increasingly invasive global consumption patterns. Today, the picture seems to have changed again; we live in a gaseous and explosive society, increasingly haphazard and constantly in the grip of torments (from Covid to War) that are endured without having any control over them.
 
What are the characteristics of this new "gaseous" society? What are the trends in consumption, values and communication? How to equip oneself for this change?
 
Participants will have the opportunity to discuss with sociologist Francesco Morace the features of this new modernity: an evaporating society in which one is forced to lift oneself off the ground in order to exist, facing the challenge of exposure to the gaze of others. To escape the fate of irrelevance, the digital space becomes the frame of one's identity and, the majority of people (but also companies) feel they do not exist without the exposure of the self. In this sense, social has marked the shift from material consumption to consumption of the self, one's experience and image.
A company today must build on these assumptions in order to meet new challenges: social innovation, labor change, and generational diversity.
 
In particular, it will be explored:

• what are the characteristics of gaseous modernity
• the central role of aesthetics for a disoriented society with fewer and fewer ethical and value references
• the new role of consumption between identification and status.