Certainty of change
A few days ago I was talking to my uncle, who works in the advertising bussiness as a creative. He explained me that now they face the problem that people are getting used to novelties being introduced all the time which sometimes mean somewhat of a sociological change; so companies are forced to reinvent their products again and again. Perhaps you’ve seen that ad of a new tv and dvd brand that says that everybody says new to sell, that’s exactly the idea.
I have always read that humans are reluctant to changes, at least to their ideas and habits. It like feeling safe because we know how things work. Now changes would be the constant thing that never changes (this sounds as one of Rumsfeld’s poems). We can’t wait for new exciting gadgets that will save us time and help us fill all this time we just saved; we have all kind of objects made in countries we’ll never visit and we are very close to people from all around the globe (well… err… we’ll keep the axis of evil out of this) while I don’t even know the name of my neighbours, and I’ve lived 4 years and a half in the same building which I know could be some kind of pathology, perhaps I’ll book an appointment with an specialist. We produce cheaper and everything becomes less and less useful. We still have bars for the moment… but waiters are getting so unprofessional that coffee tastes better at home. We get bored easily and we reuse things we don’t remember from the 60s or the 70s because they look so new again.
I think it can be argued that we expected a lot of these objects in advance, and they feel so much as an improvement! We had read SciFi books and knew scientists and technicians were working on it.
But what if it were true? Most of the sociological changes technology has produced were unexpected. Will conservatives ever advocate for the “constant change”?
How many times do you listen to the albums you download? How many songs do you have? How many music records did you listen to before you had Internet?
How many people do you regularly keep contact with? Where are they located?
How many times do you travel each year?
Note: please DO tell me all mistakes you can find in this post. I really want to improve my english outside the boring technical domain.