| Summary: | The historian Marshall Berman wrote that living in modern times means "to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation [...] and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know". Today - at a time when modernity has become a "reflexive modernity" for some, whilst for others it is already over (and for others still "we have never been modern") - it seems that Berman has grasped an important concept: a part of media narration is characterised by a fluctuation between euphoria and fear, triumphalism and rejection, as regards science and technology as well as other areas (the ambivalence of the "Frankenstein effect" discussed by Jon Turney).
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