Ch Ch Changes

Tuesday 22nd January

David Bowie sung that in 1972, and I am sure that even he could not foresee the changes in store.  The demise of Vinyl, the brief flurry that was Cassettes, the rise of CDs and they in their turn being usurped by digital.  And the rise of video’s then MTV to sell music, and now whole channels of dross on the TV, and X factor and all that stuff in order to make the latest ‘pop-stars’.

In fact David Bowie, and even The Beatles themselves would stand no chance in today’s music business.

But changes have always happened; I am slowly reading my way through the novels of Anthony Trollope, written about 150 years ago, though only 100 since I was a child or teenager and the changes are immense.  In fact in every era the changes have been immense.  Our technological revolutions may lead us to believe that they are changing ever faster, but that is maybe an illusion too.  The two World Wars of the last century brought far more changes than any time before them, not only technological but societal too.  Before the first, Officers and men would never mix, and it was partly this mixing and realizing that actually ‘Gentlemen’ were the same as mere ‘men’ that led to the political creation of the Soiclaist parties all over Western Europe.  The second did a similar thing for women, who were drafted into jobs vacated by men and since then women haven’t looked back either.

So what changes will come in the near future, say the next fifty years?  Impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy, but the rise of the BRICs, (Brazil, Russia, India and China) might give us some clues.  I suspect that our culture will move away from largely American influences and we will see far more from these previously third world cultures.

And how society will behave is just as hard to predict.  How we are going to manage in a world where increasingly computers or robots will be able to perform tasks and ‘work’ better than humans will be a challenge.  How we manage to feed an ever growing population?  How we will harbor our shrinking resources?  How we will learn to stop Global Warming?  All challenges which our generation has largely flunked.

Anyway, the only thing we can be certain of is ch ch changes.