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    Time and Change Reflection

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    John Ren Cuizon
    This excerpt discusses how change can be measured and that it is accelerating. It notes that change is relative and uneven, occurring at different speeds across different processes. Time provides a yardstick to compare diverse processes and rates of change. While measuring change faces difficulties due to defining events and intervals, there is general agreement among scholars that many social processes are accelerating markedly.

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    Time and Change Reflection

    Uploaded by

    John Ren Cuizon
    243 views1 page
    This excerpt discusses how change can be measured and that it is accelerating. It notes that change is relative and uneven, occurring at different speeds across different processes. Time provides a yardstick to compare diverse processes and rates of change. While measuring change faces difficulties due to defining events and intervals, there is general agreement among scholars that many social processes are accelerating markedly.

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    Time and Change reflection

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    This excerpt discusses how change can be measured and that it is accelerating. It notes that change is relative and uneven, occurring at different speeds across different processes. Time provides a yardstick to compare diverse processes and rates of change. While measuring change faces difficulties due to defining events and intervals, there is general agreement among scholars that many social processes are accelerating markedly.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    243 views1 page

    Time and Change Reflection

    Uploaded by

    John Ren Cuizon
    This excerpt discusses how change can be measured and that it is accelerating. It notes that change is relative and uneven, occurring at different speeds across different processes. Time provides a yardstick to compare diverse processes and rates of change. While measuring change faces difficulties due to defining events and intervals, there is general agreement among scholars that many social processes are accelerating markedly.

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    TIME AND CHANGE

    (excerpt from the book Future Schock by Alvin Toffler)

    How do we know that change is accelerating? There is, after all, no absolute way to measure change. In
    the awesome complexity of the universe, even within any given society, a virtually infinite number of
    streams of change occur simultaneously. All "things"—from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy—are,
    in reality, not things at all, but processes. There is no static point, no nirvana-like un-change, against which
    to measure change. Change is, therefore, necessarily relative.

    It is also uneven. If all processes occurred at the same speed, or even if they accelerated or decelerated
    in unison, it would be impossible to observe change. The future, however, invades the present at differing
    speeds. Thus it becomes possible to compare the speed of different processes as they unfold. We know,
    for example, that compared with the biological evolution of the species, cultural and social evolution is
    extremely rapid. We know that some societies transform themselves technologically or economically
    more rapidly than others. We also know that different sectors within the same society exhibit different
    rates of change—the disparity that William Ogburn labeled "cultural lag." It is precisely the unevenness
    of change that makes it measurable.

    We need, however, a yardstick that makes it possible to compare highly diverse processes, and this
    yardstick is time. Without time, change has no meaning. And without change, time would stop. Time can
    be conceived as the intervals during which events occur. Just as money permits us to place a value on
    both apples and oranges, time permits us to compare unlike processes. When we say that it takes three
    years to build a dam, we are really saying it takes three times as long as it takes the earth to circle the sun
    or 31,000,000 times as long as it takes to sharpen a pencil. Time is the currency of exchange that makes it
    possible to compare the rates at which very different processes play themselves out.

    Given the unevenness of change and armed with this yardstick, we still face exhausting difficulties in
    measuring change. When we speak of the rate of change, we refer to the number of events crowded into
    an arbitrarily fixed interval of time. Thus we need to define the "events." We need to select our intervals
    with precision. We need to be careful about the conclusions we draw from the differences we observe.
    Moreover, in the measurement of change, we are today far more advanced with respect to physical
    processes than social processes. We know far better, for example, how to measure the rate at which blood
    flows through the body than the rate at which a rumor flows through society.

    Even with all these qualifications, however, there is widespread agreement, reaching from historians and
    archaeologists all across the spectrum to scientists, sociologists, economists and psychologists, that, many
    social processes are speeding up—strikingly, even spectacularly.

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