The way things are going . . .

[crispy47]

I attended a lecture at National Taiwan Normal University the other day. The French department hosted a French scholar to gloss Italian history. I didn't really learn much new, but listening to him talk about these movements in art and thought that lasted hundreds of years, I thought of something strange: Imagine being born into a word that was

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[crispy47]

I wasn't just talking about technological change instigating social change. I was thinking more of technological and scientific advancement as their own ends. I mean, if it's 1300 and you're some farmer somewhere, you're probably not going to really think much about change, because there isn't so much change, because the changes there are don't necessarily affect you, and because you don't even have much of a way to learn about them.

On the other hand, we expect there to constantly be new technologies and new discoveries. At least for me, it's part of the way I think about the world-as a place where things new things are constantly being built and found out. And yet I'm continually amazed. I continually find myself say, "Well I'll be. What'll they think of next?" as though I expect people to stop thinking of things. But they never will; this is just the way things are now. This is what I find strange, and that's what I was talking about as something we should get used to.

Actually, I disagree that "people tend to overestimate the power of technology to instigate social change." I think people tend to underestimate it. When I think about technology, I think about the next cool gadget I'm going to get, or about how maybe if I lose a finger I can actually get it stuck back on. But really, it's a lot more than that. Something like the internet has changed the way I conceive physical space, and it has definitely changed my concepts of time and vacancy. Try going a week without the internet and see how different you feel all the time. More practically, wars don't take hundreds of years now, and pretty soon the majority of the world population will live in cities.

I was also talking about science. For most of history, it has not been a certainty that scientific knowledge is advancing. People would come up with theories, and some of them would be wrong and some of them would be right, and in general we were probably moving in the direction of acquiring knowledge, but it's different now, at least for a layperson. When I read scientific publications, it's not the same as reading ancient Greek philosopher-scientists. There is a definite sense, in my reading of modern scientific writing, that the solution to any give problem is just a matter of time, which give me a sense of inevitable constant change in my understanding of existence. This, in my mind, constitutes a social change.