IS CHANGE ALWAYS GOOD?

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species"

In terms of imperative our environment is God and in a chaos of change, slams the emergent organism with a blizzard of demands. It is only the most highly mutable genome that can adapt and survive its bombardment.

Some of the bedraggled earmarks of human adaptative responses to change can be seen in the rapid growth of current our version of reality found in the 24/7 Network Society. Our frantic efforts at response and adaptation can be seen the frenzied looks of humanity now caught in the explosions of informational fallout upon the senses: the loss of identity, the diversity of spiritual paths, social confusion and technological misdirection.

In a society driven by unending schedules and informational overloads we find a lack of time/space orientation and the need for a fulfilling concept of "being" that is applicable to the NOW. In the concept of a NOW space, one can find comfort in something that frees them, albeit intellectually, from the dissonance of this storm of information that blurs the edges of what is real.

The God of yore that was identifiable in terms of a "outside" readily attainable entity, who guided us and could be reached through intercession or prayer, has slowly dissolved and replaced by philosophy and ideas that attest to our need for mental, emotional and spiritual direction.

Perhaps we have turned away from this 'outward' source, or parochial God that we knew from simple tribal states when information was minimal and reality was simple, because and in response to this surplus of information from "outside" sources. The God of change we leaned about in Biology 101 who taught us all we needed to know through stimulus/response, has fallen in the light of informational overload, and our reaction can be seen in this tendency of mankind to trash the environment, as if in retaliation for the additional chaos that has become far too much to bear.

Could it be that humanity is at war with God?

In this input from 'outsourcing' we find in the informational age of the 24/7 Network Society, can be found the fallout of intellectual arrogance and its partner, disharmony. The consequences of this bombardment from our top intellectuals is revealed in the lost, vacant eyes of our youth now far from the country home of yesterday, hooked on Ipod, and the endless quest of adults haplessly searching through media streams, sheep who have strayed far away from the master—sheep who have become shepherds and who have stolen the keys to the Garden of Eden and laughed in the face of its maker.

How far and when will humankind return and by what route, are the next questions that need an answer. Can an escape from the vortex of the 24/7 Network Society's informational time stream save us, or will it simply bog us more deeply in the blizzard of informational chaos that now seems almost insurmountable?

Right from the beginning of the book, its introduction, even the concept of 24/7 lends itself to an overload of detail that leaves us struggling for meaning in the wake of its swift passage:

"First it seems worthwhile, no matter how appropriate or taken for granted the term 24/7 may seem, to try to define or explain what it means. The designation turns out to be of uncertain provenance. Google wasn’t much help to us in trying to clear things up. With characteristic overkill it located some 171,000,000 pages of possible relevance (in 0.17 seconds). After sifting through the first ten results, however, we were already discouraged. Predictably, perhaps, most of the results were related to media companies who for one reason or another had 24/7 in either their company name or as an indication of the time frame in which they promise to deliver their product or service. The only exception to this commercial rule was 24/7 Prayer (http://www.24/ prayer.com), which offers “non-stop prayer’” across the nation."1

This remark and its obvious suggestion, clearly accentuates the desperation in terms of identity loss and spiritual misdirection that is the direct result of an informational overkill!

Many blessings~Nahu Lanham

1-24/7 Time and Temporality in the Network Society edited by Robert Hassan & Ronald E. Purser 2007 Stanford, University Press.