Message-ID: <970302111559_245574427@emout01.mail.aol.com> Date: Sun, 2 Mar 1997 11:15:59 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Speed of social change To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
In a message dated 97-03-01 00:54:28 EST, mailto:John.McQuaid@PRESSROOM.COM (John McQuaid) writes:<< One of my topics is accelerating global change driven my international markets, and I am trying to burrow into the subject of cultural change in general. I am especially interested in the way social/cultural change seems (to the layperson, anyway) to be speeding up, and how the phenomenon affects cultures, and the individuals who make up those cultures. What drives the acceleration, if it does exist, and what does that mean for the future? >>
What jumps to mind is Alvin Toffler's body of work: what drives the change, he says, is THE THIRD WAVE, that transformation that is replacing the industrial wave as that one replaced the agricultural era. The results include a POWERSHIFT and the impact on us humans results in FUTURE SHOCK.
A useful precursor of Tofler is Donald Schon's THE STABLE STATE, 1973 or so but still suggestive: he argues that for all of recorded history until now people assumed "the steady state": technologies and the jobs grounded on them lasted more than a lifetime, so that we could identify ourselves with our company, a community, a career. Now, says Schon, all of those factors making for the steady state are gone, taking with them "the steady state" and its ways of ordering the consciousness of the individual and community life.
If you wanted to deal with more fundamental philosophical grapplings with stability and change you get to Hegel and his "negative dialectics" often summarized as "thesis, anithesis, synthesis"--the alternations of ideas embodied in human institutions as the "Geist" works its way into human institutions and consciousness, and, of course, Karl Marx, who "stood Hegel on his head," and attributed the changing human consciousness to the changes in the social relations of production and labor: capitalist relations produce the social structures of worker and supervisor and capitalist which generate the lifeworlds and mindsets approriate to such a way of organizing society.
Steve Eskow