This article deals with the future as a crucial element for the webbing of our individual and social life. In accordance with Simmel's reflections on the apriorities for the very possibility of society, the authors maintain that the webbing of society as we know it would not be possible without its members imagining at least some kind of future. To illustrate the importance of the future for webbing any kind of social relationship, and in order to analyse the possibilities of creating different imaginaries of the future, the authors present a case study of 60 autobiographic interviews of men and women from different class contexts collected in Germany and Spain. The authors look for what they call the images, figures and imaginaries of the future -images as the concrete objects, moments or relationships that are expected, feared, or hoped for in the future, figures as the archetypes that give meaning, inform and shape the contours of our future imaginations, and imaginaries as the webbing together of the figures and images in a narration in the future tense of our own life story, relating this imaginary to other cultural practices. The results of this research show how deep the certainty of a future, and the concrete imaginaries of the future to come, mould and shape who we are, and the directions in which we wish, can and will go.
Elders are an important part of this society and a group for which ICTs might provide useful answers to existing problems and needs. However, elders and their interests with regard to ICTs have been largely ignored due to a presupposed missing ability to use, a general disinterest in, and a lack of will to learn about ICT developments. This article wants to contribute to the debate about elders and their abilities to use and interests in ICTs. We analysed how elders in focus groups in Spain use mobile ICT applications, how they experiment with them and why they decide to use or not to use them. In our research, we have used apps as an example for ICTs because apps are considered to be flagships for technological innovation, and because, in contrast to call and messenger functions of mobile phones, the motivation for using apps has to come from the individual that uses them. Findings from 4 focus group discussions with elders from Spain suggest that age does not directly influence the perception of, experience with, and evaluation of newest technological developments. Instead past experiences and social contexts in which the technology is introduced play a role. Our results point at the need to find new formulas for introducing, and teaching ICTs to elders, and underline the need to take elders’ emotions with regard to ICTs into consideration when evaluating elders’ ICT uses.
This article focuses on the analysis of daydreams and fantasies people have regarding their partnerships in ‘non-moments’, moments in which we have time to take a break or to daydream. This article makes a strong case for the relevance of the shift from the isolation experienced within these ‘non-moments’ towards an altered experience of this isolation, which has been moulded and partially broken by the possibility to share our dreams in real time, and communicate with our significant others (here, partners), while tearing us further apart from those who share with us these moments in the same place. The analysis of such non-moments will help us to shed light on how our intimate relationships are woven on a daily basis, and how electronic communication is part of a differentiation process in which we can share our imaginaries just as we produce them.
This article wants to explore the associative relationship between epidemics, lack of hygiene and foreignness that German people, politicians and the German press have made repeatedly during the recent wave of migration from Syria to Germany. It wants to especially look at the emotions of fear, anger and the resulting hate that not only pull these two things together but that combine being a health risk and being a stranger in a way that they create a vicious circle in which one perpetuates the other and creates a condition in which one always serves as a justification for the other.We will present the relationships among fear, anger, and hate empirically by reflecting on a few interviews carried out in Germany, three press articles and people's comments in the press, on Facebook and other social media that have surfaced after a small outbreak of scabies in a refugee camp in the Jenfelder Moorpark in Hamburg. The outbreak was neither medically meaningful nor caused by a lack of the refugees' hygiene, but rather as a consequence of the bad hygienic conditions that were to be found in the provisional refugee camp. However, this little but crucial part of information never really entered into the wider public debate -partly because the local German press only focused on the outbreak itself rather than on its causes and partly because the current social context has created a lack of confidence in the press, from both sides of civil society. Instead of critical reflections on causes and backgrounds, the majority of commenting readers pronounced publically the hypothetical link between their fears of both foreigners and epidemics and used the story as a bond-maker, allowing them to create a collective emotional reaction with others based on their projected fears. Within this process of collective projection fear turned into anger, as a collective form to face individual fear, resulting in the sensation of a need for collective self-defence, a sensation that their Society Must be Defended (Foucault, 2003 Defended, Foucault, 2003).
Resumen | En el marco de la respuesta a la COVID-19, categorizada por la OMS como pandemia, el concepto de distanciamiento social se ha perfilado como clave en la gestión de esta bioemergencia. Este artículo discute el distanciamiento social desde una perspectiva sociológica, partiendo de los conceptos de proximidad y distancia de Simmel, Cantó-Milà y Sabido Ramos. Queremos mostrar los sentidos y dimensiones implícitos y explícitos otorgados a los conceptos de distancia y distanciamiento sociales durante los primeros meses de pandemia, así como su impacto en las relaciones, las interacciones y los vínculos. Abrimos una reflexión sobre el rol del encuadre de toda relación social entre distancias y proximidades, diferenciando analíticamente entre los conceptos de relación, interacción y vínculo.
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