ABSTRACT
From the early 1980s (Baudrillard, Bell, Berman) to the current debates about social fluidity (Castells, Bauman), the specific features of our societies have been increasingly perceived as fragmentation, time–space stretching and condensation, dedifferentiation, mobility, and so on. This way of looking at society has been summarized in the idea that society is now fragile and unstable, but not necessarily soft; it is like a fluid reality.
