Minute Paper 1/29

Today was the first class that I truly saw all of the ideas that we’ve been discussing separately in each class start to piece themselves together. Through the readings and the ensuing discussions we looked at how or current political systems approaches and quite often avoids the future, and how thru attempting to be better prepared for possible futures, we and our governments can at least give ourselves and generations to come a chance for a better future. Today’s class also helped me to better understand the full effect of our mental real estate in not only on how we view our future but also on how we are able to cope with the extreme changes that we have been living through. When I read the article “The future as a way of life” and how it addressed the concept of future shock, my first response was that I have never experienced this overwhelming shock/disorientation to the changes in this society that I grew up in. In this observation I found what I believe to be the answer to why my generation hasn’t experienced what I would roughly interpret as a “novelty adaptation puberty”. This is because most of us don’t really know any other type of society or patterns of change. In fact our mental real estate is comprised almost exclusively of ideas from this information society, meaning that we have not really experienced any change in our ways of life because these drastic changes are simple how things have always been for us.

Mark Alexander