quickly; we contact more people and have shorter relationships with
them; in the supermarket, car showroom, and shopping mall, we are
faced with an array of choices among styles and products that were
unheard of the previous year and may well be obsolete or forgotten by
the next. Novelty, transience, diversity, and acceleration are acknow-
ledged as prime descriptors of civilized existence.
This avalanche of information and choices is made possible by bur-
geoning technological progress. Leading the way are developments in
our ability to collect, store, retrieve, and communicate information. At
first, the fruits of such advances were limited to large organiza-
tions—government agencies or powerful corporations. For example,
speaking as chairman of Citicorp, Walter Wriston could say of his
company, “We have tied together a data base in the world that is capable
of telling almost anyone in the world, almost anything, immediately.”^2
But now, with further developments in telecommunication and com-
puter technology, access to such staggering amounts of information is
falling within the reach of individual citizens. Extensive cable and
satellite television systems provide one route for that information into
the average home.
The other major route is the personal computer. In 1972, Norman
Macrae, an editor of The Economist, speculated prophetically about a
time in the future:
The prospect is, after all, that we are going to enter an age when
any duffer sitting at a computer terminal in his laboratory or office
or public library or home can delve through unimaginable in-
creased mountains of information in mass-assembly data banks
with mechanical powers of concentration and calculation that will
be greater by a factor of tens of thousands than was ever available
to the human brain of even an Einstein.
One short decade later, Time magazine signaled that Macrae’s future
age had arrived by naming a machine, the personal computer, as its
Man of the Year. Time’s editors defended their choice by citing the
consumer “stampede” to purchase small computers and by arguing
that “America [and], in a larger perspective, the entire world will never
be the same.” Macrae’s vision is now being realized. Millions of ordinary
“duffers” are sitting at machines with the potential to present and
analyze enough data to bury an Einstein.
Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural
capacity to process information is likely to be increasingly inadequate
to handle the surfeit of change, choice, and challenge that is character-
istic of modern life. More and more frequently, we will find ourselves
208 / Influence