1 You hear it all the time: The world is changing. Fast. Faster. The Digital Age is here. Get wired. Move. Move. Move.
2 With all that pressure, it's no wonder Americans are still anxious about everyday life even though the economy continues to grow.
3 The pace of technological change seems to quicken each year and 1994 was no exception. One sign was the addition of Internet addresses to many business cards. And some people decided not to bother with cards anymore -- their electronic organizers hold all their phone numbers.
4 New technology is an ingredient in the broad changes of the economy. Some observers, such as futurist Alvin Toffler, declare the reason why people feel so uneasy is because society's institutions aren't keeping up with technology-driven change.
5 'The old, industrial-style systems are crashing and the new social and political structures are not yet in place,' Toffler said during a New York appearance.
6 But others point out that technology always changes faster than institutions, a condition sometimes described as 'cultural lag.' And so uneasiness with new technology, tools or ways of doing things is pretty constant.
7 'Technology is used as a whipping boy for a lot of other things we don't want to talk about,' said Carroll Pursell, history professor at Case Western University and author of 'The Machine in America,' to be published next spring.
8 'What it does is to obscure the real problems and to make you feel like there's nothing you can do about it,' Pursell said. 'I feel like an awful lot of people have fallen prey to it.'
9 It's not hard to do. For one thing, there are always people or companies or institutions that try to inflate technological change to set themselves apart. Technological advantage is often overstated, however, to instill fear or irrelevance in a competitor.
10 Such hype about technology is everywhere now. More parents this past yearend holiday season wondered whether to buy a personal computer for their kids. They saw the nation's leading newsmagazines devote special sections to PCs and a software company run ads with children singing, 'The world will never be the same again.'
11 But another historian pointed out that people have more control over technology than they often think.
12 'I understand its causative role, but (technology) is also a manifestation' of broader societal choices, said Alan Marcus, director of the Center for Historical Studies of Technology and Science at Iowa State University.
13 For instance, he noted, as individual rights and determination have become more important for Americans, so has the technology to express them -- Walkman stereos, cellular phones and PCs.
14 'It's an ongoing process that started with transistor radios, which teen-agers would listen to away from the big set in the living room,' Marcus said. 'We've gravitated to those technologies because we have sanctified the individual.'
15 Nonetheless, the accumulation of new devices and habits can be daunting, said Nelson Thall, president of the Marshall McLuhan Center, a Toronto-based group dedicated to broadening the research of the 1960s media guru.
16 'We're down to 40 years later and people don't understand the effect of Sputnik,' Thall said. 'Can you imagine what's going on when you layer new technology upon technology? All the effects that are happening on us subliminally?'
17 Toffler described such unease as the price for an opportunity to be part of the 'excitement and ferment that comes with a new civilization as yet not fully formed.'
18 But it's hard to know for sure that we are living through a major societal change. 'Nobody woke up in 1750 and said, `Wow, we had an industrial revolution last night,'' historian Pursell said.
19 'We might very well be going through such a change but it seems to me that the fundamentals of democracy and social justice don't change. And if the technology changes, we'll just have to pound it into a shape that we can use for these very old, traditional purposes.'

New technology is an ingredient in the broad changes of the economy . Some observers , such as futurist Alvin Toffler , declare the reason why people feel so uneasy is because society ' s institutions aren ' t keeping up with technology - driven change .
society ' s institutions
Which institutions are not keeping up?