What social change is

'Change is the only unchanging thing in society.' Yet rapid change is actually new in human history. Humans have lived on earth for about five lakh years, with civilisation for only about 6,000. Constant, rapid change belongs to the last 400 years, and it has speeded up most in the last 100.

• The sociologist Anthony Giddens pictured all of human existence as one day, midnight to midnight: agriculture would appear at 11:56 pm, civilisations at 11:57, and modern societies only at 11:59 and 30 seconds. Perhaps as much change has happened in those last 30 seconds as in all the time before.
• Sociology itself began as an effort to understand the rapid changes in Western Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries.

What counts as social change? Not every change. Social change means significant changes that alter the underlying structure of something over time. They must be both intensive (a big impact) and extensive (spread over a large part of society).

Classifying change:

• By pace. Evolutionary change is slow, over a long period; the idea comes from Charles Darwin's theory of the 'survival of the fittest', later applied to society as 'social Darwinism'. Revolutionary change is fast, even sudden, usually when the power structure changes through the overthrow of a ruling group, as in the French Revolution (1789-93) and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The word is also used for sharp transformations like the 'industrial revolution' or 'telecommunications revolution'.
• By nature. Structural change transforms institutions or the rules by which they run. The arrival of paper money is the book's example: a coin's value once lay in its gold or silver, but a note's value has nothing to do with its paper; as long as people trust it, it works as money. This made credit markets possible and changed banking and finance. Changes in ideas, values and beliefs can also cause social change: once children were treated as small adults and expected to work from five or six; as ideas about childhood as a special stage spread in the 19th and early 20th centuries, countries passed laws banning child labour and making school compulsory.
• By source or cause (the most common way): environmental, technological, economic, political and cultural, which can also be grouped as internal (endogenous) or external (exogenous).

Example (new): the spread of mobile phone payments (UPI) in India changed how millions of people, from vegetable sellers to students, handle money every day, across cities and villages alike: intensive and extensive, so it counts as social change.