ABSTRACT
Furedi argues that openness has become one of the most important – but rarely acknowledged – values of Western society. He contends that openness has become the medium through which the contemporary sensibility of boundarylessness has come to influence people’s imagination. The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the meaning and consequence of the mutation of openness from a term of description into an important value. The author claims that, through this transformation, openness has lost much of its positive association with being genuinely open to new experience. Instead it works as an instrument of surveillance that undermines the boundaries that have hitherto given meaning to communities. The corollary of the value preference for openness is the disparagement of traditional communities and their symbolic boundaries.
