<P>... a shorthand term for modern society, or industrial civilization . Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation, by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation - state and mass democracy . Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order . It is a society--more technically, a complex of institutions--which, unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past (Giddens 1998, 94). </P> <P> Other writers have criticized such definitions as just being a listing of factors . They argue that modernity, contingently understood as marked by an ontological formation in dominance, needs to be defined much more fundamentally in terms of different ways of being . </P> <P> The modern is thus defined by the way in which prior valences of social life...are reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans: time, space, embodiment, performance and knowledge . The word' reconstituted' here explicitly does not mean replaced . (James 2015, 51--52) </P> <P> This means that modernity overlays earlier formations of traditional and customary life without necessarily replacing them . </P>

What is the presented essence of modernity and its consequences