The most important characteristic of our present society may
well the incredible speed with which it changes. Whether things
evolve in a positive or in a negative way, change itself
constitutes a problem. Scientific,
technological, cultural and social innovation are taking
place at such a breath-taking pace that no one can really keep
up with them. Yesterday's revolutionary new product has become
common-place today, and will be outdated tomorrow. People
constantly need to revise their skills in order to adapt to the
changing circumstances. The problems of unemployment and growing
disparity between richer and poorer classes in most Western
nations are largely due to the fact that not everybody can cope
as well with this need for constant re-education. As traditional
agricultural and industrial jobs are disappearing, employees
need to adapt to the intellectually much more demanding jobs of
the information society. Many lack the necessary educational
background. Even the intellectually most advanced groups, the
researchers, educators, managers and technologists, often feel
overwhelmed by the changes in their domain.
Individual effects of change
It is intuitively obvious that too much change will put a
strain on people and organizations. The futurologist Alvin
Toffler (1970) has made a detailed study of the acceleration of
change and its psychological effects. He suggested that it would
lead to a set of severe physical and mental disturbances, which
he called the "future shock" syndrome. Just like
people exposed to war or disaster may develop a nervous
breakdown ("shell-shock"), people exposed to the rapid
changes of modern life may develop a state of helplessness and
inadequacy.
Researchers have indeed found a positive correlation between
change and physical illness. The "Life Change Scale"
is a psychological tool which measures the amount of change
experienced by a person over a given time interval (Holmes &
Rahe, 1967). The "Life Change" questionnaire asks
people to mark on a list which important changes they recently
underwent: move to a new home, a new job, marriage, divorce,
birth of a child, death of a family member, travel, promotion,
etc. The total score for a person is calculated as the sum of
all changes that the person experienced, multiplied by their
relative weights. Using this scale, it was shown that
individuals with high life change scores are significantly more
likely to fall ill. More surprisingly, it turned out that
illness correlates with all changes, positive (such as marriage
or promotion) as well as negative (such as divorce or job loss).
The way change affects our physical state is evidently
through its effects on our mental state. The emotional reaction
associated with change is first of all arousal. This a priori
neutral state may develop either into a positive feeling, as
when novelty elicits curiosity, excitement and wonder, or into a
negative one, as when lack of understanding triggers confusion,
tension and fear. However, the longer such arousal is sustained,
the more likely it is that interest will wear off and fatigue
will set in. If a person does not manage to find an adequate
response to the novel stimuli, he or she will experience loss of
control and distress.
The instinctive reaction of an animal to stressful situations
falls into three main categories: fight, flight or fright. The
same inherited reactions seem to underlie our negative emotions.
The "fight" reaction is associated with anger and
aggression. "Flight" corresponds to fear and anxiety.
"Fright" is the reaction of an animal that freezes or
"plays dead" in the face of uncontrollable danger. The
corresponding human emotions seem to be numbing apathy, despair
and depression, which are all characterized by helplessness.
Aggression is a short term reaction, which cannot be sustained
very long. Anxiety and fear, however, can be constantly present.
Fear is directed at a specific, frightening target, whereas
anxiety is a generalized expectation that bad things may happen.
This seems the most likely response to the continuing experience
of unpredictable and uncontrollable change. Apathy and
depression are more likely to be the outcome of a long process
of failed attempts to control the stressful situation.
Effects on society
Not only individuals but society as a whole is likely to
undergo these negative effects of too rapid change. The three
basic attitudes are easily recognized in current patterns of
social behavior. Aggression directed at no one in particular
seems to underlie phenomena like vandalism and hooliganism.
Individuals running amok and shooting scores of innocent
bystanders may suffer from a more extreme version of this
condition. Helplessness and despair can be recognized in the
increasingly common "burn-out" syndrome, and in the
ever so frequent depressions. Drug addiction may be another one
of its symptoms.
But perhaps the most common neurosis in present society is
anxiety. This is illustrated by the record use of anxiolytic
drugs (e.g. benzodiazepines) that suppress anxiety symptoms such
as sleeplessness, worrying, irritability, tension and digestive
upsets. Anxiety also shows in the many irrational fears and
scares, where far-away threats trigger disproportionate
reactions. For example, the 1991 Gulf War should have worried
only the countries neighbouring Iraq and Kuwait. Yet, the world,
and the USA in particular, for several months recorded a
spectacular drop in air traffic: people became afraid to travel
anywhere. In Belgium, a continent away from the Gulf, people
started hoarding basic food stuffs, like sugar, coffee and
flour. It is clear that this underlying current of anxiety is
often brought out and magnified by the media's bad news bias.
On the socio-economic level, anxiety is apparent in the
growing feeling of insecurity. Fear of aggression tends to
increase more quickly than the actual crime rates. Even when
economic conditions are good, governments lament the absence of
the "feel-good factor". Uncertainty makes people save
money for later rather than invest it now. The "consumer
confidence" needed to boost sales remains elusive. A main
cause seems to be the continuing threat of job loss. Although
households in the Western countries have a much higher average
income than twenty years ago, the turmoil in the labor market
makes future earnings very unpredictable. Anxiety also shows in
the public's growing distrust of different kinds of authorities
and institutions, whether they be government, police, health
care, or church (Nye et al., 1997). This distrust is stirred up
by the media's ever more extensive reporting of cases of
corruption, abuse of power or professional misconduct. More
reporting does not in general mean more cases, but more
extensive information gathering, and perhaps more emphasis on
sensational aspects because of competition between publishers.
Another basic cause for the growing feeling of uncertainty
and insecurity is the erosion of existing systems of belief:
religions, such as catholicism or hinduism, and ideologies, such
as communism or the 18th century philosophy of Enlightenment.
Such belief systems provide people with a world
view (Apostel et al., 1994), offering them a body of
principles on which they can rely and a sense of how their own
existence fits into the larger whole. Thus, people get a
positive vision
of the future, and a system of ethics and values that can
give meaning to their life. The precipitous developments in
science, society and culture, however, have invalidated many of
the assumptions underlying these traditional systems of faith.
As a result they have lost most of their authority. Since no new
systems of belief have as yet had the chance to develop, many
people have lost their sense of direction and of confidence in
the "natural order" of things. Sociological research
indeed seems to indicate that the feelings of insecurity and
distrust are strongest among the people who have the least faith
in a religion or ideology (Elchardus, 1998). On the intellectual
level, this fragmentation of traditional world views leads to
the relativistic, "postmodern" outlook.
Information overload
The
acceleration of change is accompanied by an increase in the information needed to keep up with all these
developments. This too leads to psychological, physical and
social problems. A world-wide survey (Reuters, 1996) found that
two thirds of managers suffer from increased tension and one
third from ill-health because of information overload. The
psychologist David Lewis, who analysed the findings of this
survey, proposed the term "Information Fatigue
Syndrome" to describe the resulting symptoms. Other effects
of too much information include anxiety, poor decision-making,
difficulties in memorizing and remembering, and reduced
attention span (Reuters, 1996; Shenk, 1997). These effects
merely add to the stress caused by the need to constantly adapt
to a changing situation.
Part of the problem is caused by the fact that technological
advances have made the retrieval, production and distribution of
information so much easier than in earlier periods. This has
reduced the natural selection processes which would otherwise
have kept all but the most important information from being
published. The result is an explosion in often irrelevant,
unclear and inaccurate data fragments, making it ever more
difficult to see the forest through the trees. This
overabundance of low quality information, which Shenk (1997) has
called "data smog", is comparable in its emergence and
effects to the pollution of rivers and seas caused by an excess
of fertilizers, or to the health problems caused by a diet too
rich in calories. The underlying mechanism may be called
"overshooting": because progress has inertia, the
movement in a given direction tends to continue even after the
need has been satisfied. Whereas information used to be scarce,
and having more of it was considered a good thing, it seems that
we now have reached the point of saturation, and need to limit
our use of it.
Conclusion
It seems that the biggest problem facing present-day
society is not that there is too little progress,
but rather too much of it. Our mind, physiology nor social
structures seem fit to cope with such a rate of change and such
an amount of new information. Unfortunately, change, complexity
and information overload are abstract phenomena, which are
difficult to grasp. Therefore, few people have as yet understood
that they contribute to the anxiety they feel. When trying to
explain their vague feelings of dissatisfaction, they will
rather look for more easily recognizable causes, such as
unemployment, pollution, crime, corruption or immigration. These
phenomena, which have become much more visible because of the
attention they get from the media, play the role of scapegoats:
they are blamed for the lack of quality of life which people
experience, while being only tangentially related to it. This
reinforces an atmosphere of gloom and doom.
See also:
Information
overload in the HotBot directory
