LE LABORATOIRE DE RECHERCHE EN SCIENCES DE L’INFORMATION ET DE LA COMMUNICATION DU CELSA
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‘New Modernity’ : Reality or Myth ?

Symposium Emerging Knowledge Societies, New Modernity ?, 16 septembre 2010, Université Fudan, Shanghaï

Greco-roman poets used to imagine human history as a cyclic or regressive process. They gave praise to past times. As opposed to that pattern – which was present in the term of « Rinascimento » (Renaissance, rebirth) at the dawn of modern times – modernity was gradually identified to a celebration of novelty, breaking off and future. Nowadays, the ideas of modernity and modernization are involved in renewed stakes : the fast rythm of technical innovations, the weight of production and merchandising processes, a growing culture of emergency and, more deeply, the tension between uniformisation of means of thinking on the one hand and recognition of the value of cultural diversity on the other. The promise of new times tends finally to become a ritual and even sterilizing one, because it generates redundancy. The constant forecast of civilizational and technical revolutions could eventually make uncertain the question of what is really getting changed and it hides the examination of who can really take part to those mutations, which concern all of us but can hardly be managed.

 

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