James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
Among the axioms of the day is that we live in a time of change, and those changes are taking place at breakneck speed and accelerating. So rapid are the changes that science fiction writer William Gibson has given up trying to stay ahead of the curve. Historian-journalist Gwynne Dyer argues Gibson is dead wrong. Little of consequence has changed for the developed world for most of the 80 years, he says in a compelling essay published last month. On the other hand...
On the other hand, that status quo situation could be about to come to an end, thanks to a little trend we like to call climate change. And that will make the last century look quite dull by comparison:
...if you were born in the developed parts of the world in 1975 -- or even in 1955 -- you have seen very little fundamental change in your lifetime. You travel in basically the same cars and trains and planes as your parents and even your grandparents did. You have the same domestic appliances and roughly the same social values as the previous generation, and modern medicine has not extended your predicted lifespan by even five years. Even popular music is an unbroken continuum since the 1950s. The only truly major new technology that has permeated the whole society in this whole period is computers.To see how radical Dyer's thesis is, all you have to do is search for phrases like "time of change" on the net. The first result I got this morning talked about changes in copyright rules, and began with "Adam is reported to have said to his mate, on being expelled from Eden, 'Eve, we live in a time of change.'"
Not to downplay the challenges facing content-producers and intellectual property rights lawyers, but Dyer is right. These kind of changes don't affect society in nearly the same way that the industrial revolution did. Similarly, while iPods might be a convenient improvement on the Walkman, there's nothing particularly revolutionary in an essential way about them. "We should probably be grateful for that," says Dyer,
...because high-speed change, however exhilarating at the start, really is disorienting and exhausting if it lasts over a whole lifetime. But it's probably coming back to destabilise the lives of our children and grand-children, who will likely face drastic changes in the climate that affect everything right down to the availability of food for their families.Gibson probably is wrong. Fortunately, not all science fiction stars are. Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, recently released the final volume of a trilogy on the political and social consequences of impending climate change (Sixty Days and Counting). And good thing, too. Because it's important that we understand just how significant climate change can be, especially compared with the relatively predictable world with which most of us not living in rapidly developing nations are no familiar.The cause of those changes, ironically, will not be the high-tech innovations of the 20th century but the dirty old 19th-century technologies that we built this industrial civilisation on. In other words, we are going to get two waves of disruptive change for the price of one.
Read the whole piece. It's worth it.
Comments
It all depends on what you call "quick". In my neck of the woods (which might be considered slightly backwards in that case), it seems to me that farmers of the 19th century lived a rather similar life to those a couple of centuries before.
My grandmother (1914-present) has experienced what I (and she) call a real and quick change in her lifetime. I mean electricity and the washing-machine, besides airplanes ;).
The other factor that will change this "status quo" is the coming depletion of fossil fuels. Some societies in African and South American countries are already reeling backwards due to power cuts, increase in the price of foodstuff...
Posted by: Sophie | September 7, 2007 10:48 AM
My grandmother was born in 1888. As a girl, she went to school in a horse-drawn carriage. She was the first in the family to fly, early in the 1950s. (The men who'd served in WW1 and WW2 hadn't flown: they went to war and returned by ships.) She lived to see Apollo on the Moon. In between, the country went from agrarian to urban.
And she never wrote a thing about it all.
Posted by: 6EQUJ5 | September 7, 2007 11:09 AM
Dyers is dead wrong, how can you leave out the Computer Revolution when so much of our society is now based on it. Similar arguments against the rapid pace of development could also be made of Pre-1975 life if you throw out the Industrial revolution too. The planes we fly in now are radically different from those in 1975, for one thing they crash a lot less, and air travel is a necessity not just a luxury. Picking and choosing entrenched industries isn't fair to all the innovation we've seen over the last 30+ years.
There was and still is a Rapid Pace of change after 1975...
Computers, Internet, Biotech Revolution, HIV/AIDS, Robotic Planes (with $#%*^@! bombs), IEDs, Digital Porn, a Birth Control Menagerie, the Rise of Neo-conservatism, Hybrid Cars, Email/IM/TXT, China, the Human Genome Project, the end of the Cold War!, the developments in cancer research alone are staggering...
Posted by: Lance Pickens | September 7, 2007 2:15 PM
You're actually comparing the developents in recent cancer research to the changes in medicine due to the development of antibiotics? Which do you think made a bigger change in life expectancy? The Dyer piece says that our grandparents have seen far more change than we have, and he's right. Electricity, running water, telephones, commercial air travel, and the personal automobile are all greater changes than we've had to get used to. My great-grandmother watched the moon landings on tv, and she still said that, as a farmer's wife, the telephone was the biggest life-changing invention she ever saw. It meant that it wasn't a 30-minute trip just to speak to a neighbour. That, alone, is more of a change than I have seen in thirty years of life.
Posted by: Jason M | September 7, 2007 8:02 PM
Don't fret, Jason, you might get to experience the failing of classic antibiotics during your lifetime, due to the evolution of resistance in bugs. That will be a great change.
Then you might get interested in all the boring research that has been going on in the labs in the last 30 years.
30 years ago we hadn't sequenced the human genome.
30 years ago retroviruses were not that interesting.
Posted by: Sophie | September 8, 2007 5:14 AM
I'm actually prepared to go along with the idea that the current pace of change is frequently exaggerated. But I'm afraid that Dyer's article does little to substantiate the claim. The first quoted paragraph is complete and utter nonsense. For example:
I was born a little after 1955. And I travel in basically the same planes as my parents and even my grandparents? At my age my mother hadn't even flown, and my father had only flown for his work, in propeller-driven aircraft. My grandparents never flew, and when they were my age flying was too expensive for them even to contemplate. And anyone who thinks that modern cars are basically the same as those of two generations ago knows precious little about cars.
But more ludicrous still is this bit:
When I was the age that my daughter is now, my parents had no washing machine, no freezer - I think we had just acquired a simple fridge - no television (let alone video-recorder or DVD) no stereo (let alone CD player), no microwave, no dishwasher, no central heating, no power tools. Not to mention all the minor things like clock-radios, dimmer switches and cordless phones. The only reason we had a telephone at all was that my father was a doctor - less than half of households had one then.
I am not impressed.
Posted by: Stephen | September 8, 2007 6:21 AM
I also think that Dyer is wrong on the level of change. There have been tremendous advances, and not just the technological kind. We just don't feel the effects as much for two reasons (I can think of).
The first is that most of the changes have the benefit of easing the work we do. These changes have also introduced novel ways of wasting our free time. It is hard to get stressed out over changes that make life easier and more interesting.
I think the second reason has to do with our society becoming inurred to changes as they come on a greater frequency. Even societal advances don't provoke the the same stresses and backlash as they once did.
When you look at the Industrial Revolution, circumstances were different. The populace had previously lived in the same manner for hundreds of years. All of a sudden, they had to go out of their way to move into unprecedented new environments, and work strange new jobs that sapped more of their time and strength than their old occupations did.
However, Dyer is right about the changes coming. Global Warming will probably cause the same problems the Industrial Revolution did. It will create unprecedented environmental change. It will force people to go out of their way to move, and it will force them to work more. We can be sure that this will be a major cause of stress for those living through it. It will also make them sit up and notice.
Posted by: Russ | September 8, 2007 3:12 PM
I'm sorry, but this issue is sooo 1998: http://www.users.bigpond.com/russellblackford/singular.htm.
Things have moved along a bit since then.
Posted by: Russell Blackford | September 12, 2007 8:05 AM
Damn. This might work better. If not, I give up.
http://www.users.bigpond.com/russellblackford/singular.htm
Posted by: Russell Blackford | September 12, 2007 8:08 AM
It's not hard to tell that Dyer is not black, not female, and not gay.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | October 2, 2007 8:03 PM