Change Immunity

So I've had this idea in my head for a couple weeks, and I want to actually get it out of my head and into the record. I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about the importance of futurism, in which I basically argue that the accelerated pace of change makes futurism a necessity just like market analysis and weather reports. But here's the really interesting question about change: why is it accelerating? I know people are always saying that the spread of information and connectivity is behind it, but why? What, exactly, is happening?

I started thinking about change as a virus. Each time I encounter a new idea that alters my daily behavior or my life philosophy or my sexual habits or whatever, I've caught a virus. This is hardly a new idea. Viral spread of ideas and information is a very popular topic these days. The bit that really fascinates me is the extrapolation to a concept of individual change immunity. How well do you resist change?

We all have some level of change immunity. If we didn't we'd be redirecting so often we wouldn't get anything done. There are thousands of potential new ideas in even pretty mundane experiences, and our fellow humans are also repositories of the unexpected, even those we think we know well. Generally speaking we filter all that disturbance out, cherry-picking information that supports our current patterns and ditching all the rest of it. A couple hundred years ago our change immunity was good enough to allow us to keep living our lives with minimal upheaval, even over generations. A fellow might wander into the village bringing samples of the fabulous new drink from the new world and convince a few people to try it. They would promptly spit out the bitter dreck and go home for a nice cup of tea; so much for Starbucks.

These days the sheer volume of exchanges and encounters with new ideas is overwhelming our change immunity. We spread new thoughts and experiences to our friends and family all the time. In my case, being young and embedded in Silicon Valley culture, it's happening every day. Thus I contribute to the dizzying whirl, where we never quite find our feet.

Is it possible to measure individual change immunity? Take me, for instance. I actually like change much of the time. In fact, I have a rather serious problem with boredom in my day to day life. I don't tend to stay in a job, or a location, for very long. I would have been the person who, when offered a drink made of ground up boiled beans that tasted distinctly like tree bark, would have said "Sure!" (And then gotten the shivers, had heart palpitations, and probably been exorcised, since it turns out I'm allergic to caffeine, but that's not the point.) My friend Steve, on the other hand, lived for years with a group of close friends who were all flamingly liberal, and managed to change his conservative political views not one bit. It just seemed to wash over him, and the dissonance between his affection for us as people and his avowed hatred of our positions didn't seem to bother him one bit. He was immune.

Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson posited in the Illuminatus! trilogy that there were in fact two types of humans: homo neophilus and homo neophobus. Is it true? I wonder how we would measure that?