Change for change’s sake

We are certainly not the first generation to experience rapid change. But we may be the first one in which change is largely detached from any specific need for it. Though Marshall McLuhan once posited that technology creates change, the very converse may be true. It is the desire or need for change that creates technology. The need for a faster and more efficient mode of transportation in an expanding nation led to the invention of the automobile and airplane. The need for faster and easier communication led to the telegraph and then the telephone. The need to connect, inform, and entertain an ever-growing country led to radio and then television. And so it goes.

But it may have simply been that McLuhan was anticipating our current age where need is largely irrelevant. What is the need for, say, an iPad, or any of the thousands of other gizmos that flood the market? One might conclude that the need is not so much for the device (a larger iPhone!), or the software or the website or the app (following someone’s daily doings in 140-character bites!) as for change itself. We seem to be addicted to change for its own sake.

Of course technophiles would argue that all these new things address a host of new social needs. As society becomes more atomized, we need more social networks, phones, cameras, etc. to keep us in touch. As society becomes more corporatized, we need more outlets to express ourselves and exercise our democratic impulses. As the world generates more information, we need more ways of accessing that information. New technologies and websites are just a means of navigating the world and making it more manageable.

All of this may very well be true — in theory. But it is also true, as many can personally attest, that when we are deluged with things that are supposed to make our lives more manageable, the sheer quantity only adds to the lack of manageability. In the past, whatever the actual or collateral effects, technological change was generally intended to bring some sort of comfort or ease or increased efficiency. It helped us order the world. Today’s change is more likely to bring a sense of discomfort, unease, and discombobulation. There is simply too much to know, much less digest.

The question is: If the technologies we are developing aren’t really answering any pressing need and if they seem to unsettle many of us rather than comfort us, why do we seem to be addicted to change? It may be that keeping up with change is a form of self-gratification for which one obviously needs change itself. Those who can keep up, especially the young, can feel that they are masters of a strange, arcane new world, which may be why tens of thousands of people stand in line for hours to pick up every new Apple appliance on the day it is introduced.

Or it could be that change gives us a sense of purpose, of moving forward, even when we don’t know what the purpose is. Or it could be that this kind of incremental, daily change of new apps and websites and smartphones is a safe substitute for larger political and social changes that we either fear or that we know we won’t achieve.

But another possibility is that we are flattered by the idea of being in an unprecedented epoch of change not just because it makes those of us who understand new technologies feel special but because it makes this age so special. New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, in a recent essay tossing a brickbat at social networking, cited a quote from historian Robert Darnton: “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past — even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.’’ What Darnton didn’t say is that the real purpose of our addiction to change may have been to create that false consciousness.

All of which means that the profusion of and celebration of the new is really not so much a love of innovative technologies as a form of social narcissism. It says that no people have ever been like us because no people have ever generated so much and such thorough change so quickly. In sum, all these apps, websites, and various boxes make us superior to anyone else who has ever lived.

It is an attitude that is going to continue to push change whether the change has any substantive value or not. Twitter anyone? When you’re an addict, you don’t care whether the drug is good for you, only that you have it. We’re the addicts now. We’re hooked on change, and we’re going to want more and more of it. We’re special that way.

Neal Gabler is the author, most recently, of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.’’