Pondering Change

A 2009 article in Homiletics magazine has led to this reflection.

Our entire life depends on it. People fear and work to avoid it. We elected President Obama, who promised it. Bookstores are crammed with guides on how to create it personally and manage it professionally. Sometimes it is the only constant in life, and other times people desperately want it but cannot seem to muster it.

Change.

The longer we live, the more of it we see. Consider a few childhood classics that have left nostalgia behind while looking to change with the times.

The board game Monopoly was built on obscure geographic locales from Atlantic City. Without Monopoly, nobody outside of Jersey would know Marvin Gardens and Oriental Avenue. But because 750 million people around the world have played the game, Parker Brothers has now released a globalized World Edition. City streets have been replaced by actual cities, which were determined by Web site voters.

Boardwalk is replaced by Montreal, Illinois Avenue by London, and Water Works and Electric Co. by Solar and Wind Farms. Instead of Dollars, players spend Monos, a fictional currency based on the Euro. And they no longer buy, sell and collect rent with cash; they do it by registering electronic transactions on their calculator-like personal banking units.

The game Clue also got a face-lift. The murder-mansion game board now has a spa and home theater. Professor Plum is Victor Plum, a billionaire video-game designer. Colonel Mustard is now former football star Jack Mustard.

            Nostalgic food favorites have changed as well. Recently, M&M’s have gone “Premium,” with new flavors including almond, raspberry almond, mocha, mint and triple chocolate. The Premiums, which lack their predecessors’ hard shell, come in an upscale, trendy box instead of that tired brown-paper wrapper.

And most of us remember the nation-gripping taste-drama that surrounded Coca-Cola becoming New Coke, reprising Classic Coke, then reverting back to just plain old Coke.

Another changing classic is the Bible. Think about the medium by which we read the Bible.

In the ancient world of Judaism, people memorized and passed on Scripture orally. Hebrews took papyrus technology from the Egyptians and wrote on scrolls. Later, they wrote on sturdier parchment — dried animal skins. These were combined into exorbitantly expensive booklike codices. In the 15th century, the printing press revolutionized the world by getting Bibles into the hands of nonclergy for the first time. Today we beam texts onto PowerPoint slides, and people bring Bibles to church on the iPhone.

            Think about all the ways technology has altered age-old interactions between people. We used to talk face to face. Then we created the telegraph and eventually saw a phone in every home. Now we carry our phones, ditch our land lines and drop text messages to avoid those pesky, lengthy human interactions.

Previous generations wrote letters and posted them through couriers. Then MIT nerds in the ’60s created an intranet, which led to e-mail, which spawned a worldwide Internet. One-to-one communiqués became SPAM, Facebook wall postings and Tweets about what cereal we ate for breakfast.

Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien predicts one giant time-wasting Web site to come: MyTwitFace.com.

 

However, the point is not to disparage change. The point is to recognize that change is the air we breathe.