ABSTRACT
In this concluding chapter, I focus on issues of self and collective identity, engaging with arguments about the emotional, experiential and performative dimensions of contemporary social life, and what might broadly be termed the symbolic construction of ‘community’ (Cohen 1989) in modern societies. At various points over the coming pages, these issues are explored in relation to media and their uses, although my point of departure here will be a more general account of the formation of the self offered by Anthony Giddens (1991). Ultimately, he attempts to link the intentionality of personal lives with the extensionality of globalising processes, insisting that his account, despite its strong emphasis on self-identity, is not primarily a ‘work of psychology’. Rather, it puts a sociological stress on the ways in which personal feelings are bound up with modernity’s institutional features (giving rise, in particular, to those unique conjunctions of ‘trust’ and ‘risk’ that were mentioned briefly at an earlier stage in the book). For Giddens (1991: 2), then, self and society are now interconnected in a ‘global milieu’, where ‘mechanisms of self-identity … are shaped by – yet also shape – the institutions of modernity’.
