Zygmunt Baumann - Identity

It was discussed by Lars Dencik that race, gender, country or place of birth, family and social class are now becoming less important when trying to establish a person's identity. At the same time though, there is a longing for new groups to be formed in which one can identify themselves with and facilitate. The idea of interpreting one's identity through definitions such as race or social class is an increasingly outdated one, for there are much more intricate sources of identifying a person that do not accommodate for stereotyping.

Bauman also discusses the idea that due to the rise in social technology, we are losing the ability to enter into spontaneous interaction with 'real' people. these virtual communities that we find online only create an illusion of intimacy and pretense of community. They are not in any way a substitute for having a conversation with a person in real life. If anything, these online communities only make coming to terms with your own personal identity much more difficult than it would have previously been.

Andy Hargreaves notes that people walk around talking to themselves, with the characteristics of a paranoid schizophrenic, completely ignorant of their surroundings. He suggests people no longer use their small amounts of free time during the day to think, but instead numb their thoughts by scouring the internet, searching for ''evidence that someone, somewhere may need or want them.'' (Bauman, 2005, 25). Technology not only affects what we do now, but also how we think.

In contradiction to what can be witnessed in modern day 'city strollers', Georg Simmel's strollers of the city streets (often referred to as urban strollers) were noted to have taken a distance from what they saw and watched in the city. ''They visited the theatre without joining it's company'' (Bauman, 2005, 26). they observed people and situations in the city, but without interfering. Erving Goffman, alongside Hargreaves, described an inventory of 'civil inattention stratagems', a series of documented gestures and body movements one uses when interacting with a stranger to signal their desire to stay distant and uninvolved. Simmel's urban strollers and Goffman's practitioners did not search for 'someone, somewhere who needs or wants them', but instead had this comfort in their homes and workplaces, ready to need and want when required.

Thanks to the advancement in mobile technology, we no longer need Goffman's code of civil inattention, ''we parade our detachment from the street we walk, no longer needing the elaborate etiquette. Switching on the mobile, we switch off the street.'' (Bauman, 2005, 25). We use technology as a shield from real life interaction, no longer feeling the urgency to connect with the people or the environment we're in.