The Rapid Rate of Change (changed)

~ “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” ~

The other day I happened upon this passage:

News travels fast and far in the Internet age.  The pulse of all humanity is quickening, as if our planet, after traversing, on its journey through space, some somnolent and bemused zone of the Universe, were now emerging into a region bathed in vivifying rays, or filled with cosmic benzedrine in the insterstellar dust.  It seemed to act simultaneously on all levels of the nervous system of mankind … as a stimuland and aphrodisiac, manifesting itself as a thirst of the spirit, an itch of the brain, a hunger of the senses, a toxic release of the passions.  The human glands seemed to produce a new hormone. 

Only…. not quite that passage.   The quotation is from Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, chapter “Rumour and Report.”  It begins:

News travelled fast and far in the sixteenth century.

and otherwise continues as above, though in the past tense ("was quickening", etc.).   The technological element then was the invention of the printing press;  but as Koestler represents the scene, that was not the essence.   He describes a scene (we’re in the 1500s, mind) that could almost be our own of YouTube and Twitter, where the rapid spread of information is

a process of dilution and diffusion and distortion, which affected ever-increasing numbers, including the backward and illiterate… [reaching people not from the original texts, but] through hearsay and echo.

~

The plaint is perennial.  Here is another instance.

In 1908, Freud published a work of haute vulgarisation, "Die 'kulturelle' Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität”, in the charmingly titled periodical Mutterschutz.  The title is very modern, in the Modernist sense of ‘modern’ (which by now, of course, in Webworld, is old hat).  It suggests that classic of nervousness, Berlin Alexanderplatz, which  however  it anticipates by a couple of decades.  Characterizing the essay, Jones writes:

Freud quoted several writers who were alarmed at the increase of neurotic affections.  They drew a terrifying picture of the severe condidtions of life at the beginning of the century, which read strangely to those of us who look back on that epoch  as a golden age. … The essential trouble  was the incredible speed of communication in those days.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 253

 ~“Nothing new under the sun” ~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Ich bin Sigmund Freud, and I approved this message.)

~        

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