ABSTRACT
Within late modern society individuals cannot rely on traditional and localised mechanisms of trust such as kinship, community and religion for protection but must develop their own personal systems. For example Giddens notes the ways in which individuals create personal networks of friends and develop relationships of intimacy to provide personal security (Giddens 1991: 102). Since modern risks are increasingly generated by human action (e.g. pollution) and their effects no longer restricted to the poor and vulnerable, even the rich and wealthy cannot protect themselves (Beck 1992: 23), so the fear and anxiety they engender permeates the whole of society:
[Risk] has come to stand as one of the focal points of feelings of fear, anxiety and uncertainty...Massumi argues that individuals in late modernity experience a constant low-level fear, which is vague, not as sharp as panic or localized as hysteria but rather ‘A kind of background radiation saturating experience’.
