Thursday 24 April 2008

Liquid Love

Adbusters describes: as fast as the influence of virtual communities has grown, a body of thought condemning its corrosive effects on society has sprung up as well, from both mainstream and academic sources. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, sees nothing to be amused about in a tendency towards what he calls “liquid life,” arguing that technologically mediated interaction leads to a fluid, detached relationship to real-life others. “Virtual relationships . . . set the pattern that drives out all other relationships,” Bauman laments, with reference to internet dating, “That does not make the people who surrender to them happy. You gain something, you lose something else.” More here.

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I am director of the Media and Persuasive Communication (MPC) network at Bangor University where I also lecture on political-economy of the media. I am currently working on a book provisionally titled Deconstructing Privacy for Peter Lang and leading two empirical projects in connection with privacy perception and the use of new media for smoking cessation. I am author of Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process (Routledge, 2013); The Mood of Information: A Critique of Behavioural Advertising (Continuum, 2011); and Digital Advertising (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009). Please contact me at mcstay@bangor.ac.uk if you are interested in Ph.D supervision or consultancy services.