ACADEMIA Letters Pandemic in the Era of Liquid Modernity Zübeyde Demircioğlu We have been going through an unprecedented period in the history of humanity. While the COVID-19 pandemic is transforming society in a way that has not been witnessed before, it is also redefning the way we make sense of the world. The contribution of digital technologies to this transformation is undeniable. Although we claim that we have been digitizing for a long time now, the pandemic has taken this to the next level. We have been living in a new era, which Bauman termed “liquid” a long time ago; however, with the pandemic, this liquidity has increased both quantitatively and qualitatively. Modernity that establishes its identity on binary oppositions such as inside-outside, good฀evil, and friend-enemy, claims that the world has an inherently ordered unity and every new thing, apart from binary oppositions, disrupts the unity. Therefore, modern culture has no tolerance for things that cannot be categorized through standards and that disrupt the binary structure. To sum up, modernity stipulates a world without ambiguity, uncertainty, randomness, and mediocrity (Bauman, 1991). It has been understood once again during the pandemic that we do not live in such a world anymore. We have been living in a “liquid” modernity, as Bauman puts it, for a long time. It is an era in which temporal and spatial distances are redefned, thanks to technology (Bauman, 1998), there is a new space-time structure, and life has transformed in every aspect. Liquid in the most general sense of the term, refers to matters that do not have a specifc shape and takes the shape of the container they are in. In this new era, many things are unstable; like liquids, they are constantly changing: our interests, our attractions, our dreams, our fears, our hopes and worries, our reasons, etc. All these changes often happen so quickly that it is difcult to keep track of, manage and direct them. However, liquid modernity, characterized by uncertainty and instability, prioritizes the mobile, fexible, adaptable, and transient rather than the ingrained and fxed. Therefore, in order to survive, we have to adapt to such a changing Academia Letters, July 2021 Corresponding Author: Zübeyde Demircioğlu, demircioglu_z@yahoo.com Citation: Demircioğlu, Z. (2021). Pandemic in the Era of Liquid Modernity. Academia Letters, Article 2361. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0