“Historic forms are up for grabs. As the pace of our culture accelerates, surfaces are stripped away, their skins lifted, reapplied and reassigned meanings with increasing frequency. […]
The immediacy of television, satellite connections, fax machines and phone modems has propelled our reality into hyperdrive. These technological advances, when combined with the American values of freedom of consumptive choice, upward mobility, and progress through rapid turnover, in part a byproduct of consumerist growth strategies of 20th century commerce, create an insatiable appetite for the new. ‘Roland Barthes called this phenomenon neomania, a madness for perpetual novelty where ‘the new ’has become defined strictly as a purchased value, something to buy.’”
— Anne Burdick (via)