Future Shock

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Summary: Shock This!!
Review: Alvin Toffler is one crackerjack sociologist. He wrote a series of books concerning the direction of society, the first being this book, Future Shock. Future Shock was written in 1970, and it must have caused a sensation at the time. Toffler examines so many sociological issues that the mere scope of this book is mind-boggling. Toffler went on to write The Third Wave and Powershift, both of which I have not read. While some of Toffler's theories in this book did not pan out, most the observations he makes are eerily true.

Toffler's main argument is that humanity, as of 1970, is in the midst of an enormous shift from an industrial society to a super-industrial society. This new society will be characterized by such things as an acceleration of images, words, ideas, and technologies that could possibly overwhelm mankind (Sound familiar? Watch the news tonight and see how many graphics float by on the screen). Mankind will suffer a serious disconnect when these new ideas reach their fruition (if not well before then). This disconnect is "future shock," an inability to process the enormous amounts of information and change associated with the super-industrial revolution. Toffler likens future shock to the same sort of disorientation that a person experiences when he moves to a new area, or a new country, and suffers a severing of all he has known. While some people can adjust with seeming ease to this kind of dislocation, most of us suffer various maladies from this "shock." Toffler ends up attributing most of societies ills to this jarring social shock. Crime, drug use, the disintegration of society, the burgeoning of quasi-religious movements: all of these are symptoms of a society that can no longer cope with the vast amounts of information and change that technology is bringing about.

These changes involve education, work, government and other dimensions of life. Toffler believes that we should not be afraid to scrap massive sections of any of these areas if doing so can improve our chances of adjusting and functioning within the new society. Toffler proposes forming numerous groups that would deal exclusively with trying to take charge of the situation so that a safer, slower future will come about. Toffler even supports oversight of technology so that any new products or ideas can be examined to determine their effects on society at large (a big no-no to big business).

Some of Toffler's visions are pretty impressive. Toffler predicts that work will increasingly be made up of short-range ad hoc committees that would tackle specific problems within a company. This is certainly true today, although the hierarchy is still alive and well in the business community. Toffler also saw the explosion in the entertainment industry, even though some of his ideas are pretty weird and have yet to be realized. Such ideas as genetic engineering and cloning are still in the formative stages, but Toffler mentions them here as well. One of the more interesting observations in this book concerns the structure of the family. Toffler sees divorce as a problem, and he proposes the idea of short-term contractual marriages as a possible solution. I whole-heartedly support this idea if it doesn't involve alimony payments! He also believes that children could be farmed out to families whose sole purpose in society would be to take care of kids. Kind of like daycare, except the little rugrats won't come home at the end of the day.

There really isn't any reason to read this book today unless you're a sociologist, interested in seeing the same old day-to-day stuff in a new way, or just interested in seeing how freaky some of Toffler's ideas are. Mr. Toffler does come off as a huge socialist, and that's a bit scary. Still, this is an intelligent book written in an easy style. You could do a lot worse than reading this one.

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Summary: FUTURE SHOCK:INTRODUCTION TO AMERICA'S TECHNOLOGICAL MIRACLE
Review: Alvin Toffler's Future Shock is by now almost a quarter of a century old.

Yet the concepts and issues it tackles is amazingly relevant even today. Coming from my native India, I literally finished Future Shock only a day before I left.

I have found that the issues of technological transformation that Toffler studies in the Future Shock are relevant not just to the United States but in many ways to the world. Because willy-nilly or for ad-hoc fashionable Americanism most societies in technological transformation do take their cues from America. The symptoms of a society in technological transformation are increasingly being felt and seen ... not just the U.S. even in India and other countries.

Alvin Toffler may not be entirely objective in his evaluation of the phenomenon of future shock but he surely is a pioneer in the sense that he has identified the pulse of the 20th century techno society.

Walking down Manhattan from Port Authority, if you are a first time visitor to New York City, you will see happening in front of your eyes the crazed, frenzied and technology driven phenomenon that is future shock. If you live in this system for a signigicant number of days you would also realise that you can adapt to it faster than you think.

You would also realise that Future Shock doubles up as a manual to understanding and interpreting in a general manner the phenomenon of urban, techno-driven American megacities. Something, that all newcomers to America would do well to know and apply ... not in full and absolute ways but as a general framework to build their own thesis on future shock.

Future Shock, will most probably be treated as a seminal work in social psychology for a number of decades. But it does not make every proposition of Toffler's, an inviolate principle. It is at best, even after two and a half decades, an advanced and "work in progress" hypothesis ; as future shock still continues to unfold itself in our daily life. Whether it becomes a viable and consistent theory, remains to be seen. But most would agree, that it shall never quite become law, because America is a technology driven civilisation ...the youngest civilisation. Tomorrow the driving civilisation (or civilisations) of the world, might not be thoroughly technologically driven. It may have as its driving engine not just technology but something entirely different to anything presently known to humanity.

Read this book but realise, it is not a manual, it is a rough guide. It is still hypothesis, not a cause and effect system. And above all, judge things for yourself, not through Toffler's eyes. You will realise that things that seemed weird around you begin to make a lot of sense.

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Summary: The Future Shock that's NOW !
Review: Few times in life one gets the chance to be in such a position in which at the same time it is possible to speculate on the future outcome of social change, and yet at the same time be able to test such ideas against the hard facts of real life. Alvin Toffler's Future Shock is a book that allows us all to do just that; in simple yet imagination-capturing terms this is a classic 20th-century sociological masterpiece that will take you from the ideas of an ever changing world, to the analysis of the instability of rapid shifting institutions, from a technologically overstimulating environment, to the social impact of the throw-away society. Throughout the book (originally published in 1970) Toffler will guide the neophyte and the erudite alike in a fascinating vision of a future few of us are ready to assimilate, and that at the same time we all seem destined to confront just as we read the book. Of course, this is not an actual attempt to describe a single must-happen-this-way vision of the future, but no doubt that from the vantage point of most societies today, it is astonishingly easy to find actual parallelisms between our every day lifes and Toffler's paradigm. This is definitely a must-read ......have you had some Future Shock lately ?

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Summary: AWESOME, UNBELIEVEABLE INSIGHT INTO THE FUTURE FROM '71 VIEW
Review: Future Shock - Alvin Toffler 1971

Normally I can go on and on, but I won't. I'll make this short and sweet. I first read Future Shock back in 1971 when I was a sophmore in high school growing up in CT. My first thought was, oh no - another boring book and I never heard of this guy.

Well, to my amazement I started reading the book that evening after * baseball practice (*which is the only thing that mattered to me at that time).

I was fascinated by Mr. Toffler's look into the future and what he perceived would become of our society as we knew it than. (I grew up in a small rural town in CT and nothing much out of the normal happened - except for when Will's Pizza Parlor closed on main st, because his cow's had escaped from his little farm and we had to round them up - excitement PLUS). Enough said, I have read the several times over the years and am amazed at the insight Mr. Toffler had and saddened at the fact that a lot of what he predicted is now a "reality." He's truly a great author and has tremendous insight in society. It would be an honor to meet him and have my "original" book signed, someday.

I don't thing anybook I have ever read, had such a tremendous impact on me or my family ... I kept telling them about the book - chapter-by-chapter.

Enough said, take care and "KEEP ON READING ...

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Summary: More valuable as hindsight
Review: I first read this book on its initial publication, and as an impressionable, twenty-three year old former Marine in college, thought I was holding a Rosetta stone of the world to come, imagining myself one of the anointed cognoscenti, an imprint not discouraged by the publisher. Similar ideas of the coming decades were then being propounded by (among others) Daniel Bell and Herman Kahn. I encountered Mr. Toffler briefly in the spring of 1970 after an address at the University of Florida, and asked him whether, for all the absorbing projections he presented, the dreary, elemental reality of the foreseeable future would not be the simple crush of numbers (this was the heyday of Paul Ehrlich, remember). He said that he thought that by that time we would be colonizing planets. And while I certainly can't hold one to a casual comment tossed off to a shouted question, it does illustrate the golly-whiz aspect of the general argument here that tends to sidle up to hysteria. I mean, twenty five billion dollars to send five to Mars where real population relief would mean sending billions, you see the problem.

Consider, in the year 1800 the fastest a person or message could reliably travel was the pace a horse could walk in a day, same as in 1800 BCE. In 1900, a person could cross this continent in three days, a message instantaneously, and we were on the verge of flight. Talk about obliterating time and space; that was real, orders-of-magnitude existential change, yet it is one of the conceits of the early twenty-first that our ordeal is blindingly unique.

The fascinating thing , as recounted by such as Eric Hoffer and Barbara Tuchman, was that, at least in the West, the nineteenth century was imbued with hope for the future, while in the twentieth atavistic terrors from mankind's dark past were what created the age of anxiety, not the novelty of the new.

This book is a valuable popularization of late twentieth futurist ideas, but the overwhelming psychological challenge today is the disappearing Twin Towers, not the disappearing Safeway


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Summary: Plausible in 1970, but dated now........
Review: I read this book in 1975 while in 7th grade and thought it was awesome. However, the future "Shock" has failed to materialize as predicted.

Almost all of the technological changes that really changed society happenned from 1850-1950. If you took a person from the developed world in 1950 (let alone 1970, the date of this book) and plopped them in 2004, they'd have little trouble adapting. Air travel, telephones, radio, TV, etc. would all be completely familair......... Even much ballyhooed technology such as the Internet or cell phones are easily understood and refinements of older technologies.....

Now take someone from 1850 and drop them in 1950.....That would be a Future Shock!

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Summary: A second look at the 1970 classic with 20/20 hindsight.
Review: If you are old enough, think back to the year 1970. There were no pocket calculators, home VCRs, personal computers or electronic digital watches. Households in which both parents --particularly mothers-- worked were uncommon. Home satellite television systems did not exist.This was the environment in which Alvin Toffler wrote "Future Shock".The book is an excellent study in how humans deal with rapid technological and social change in the late twentieth century. Many of the devices and conditions we deal with on a daily basis in the 1990's were foretold by Toffler in this brilliant work. Toffler concluded that millions of people will find it increasingly difficult to cope with the rate of change in the future. Well, the future which Toffler described is now. "Future Shock" is well worth another look for those of us who wish to see how far we have progressed. And how far we need to go

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Summary: Must Reading For Any Concerned Citizen!
Review: It is a pleasant surprise to see that this book has been reissued as a hardcover. In the thrity years since its original publication, the basic truths and awesome prognositications have largely come to pass. Of course, in the process Mr. Toffler has become something of a cottage industry himself, since publishing several sequels (The Third Wave, Power Shift, etc.). Yet nothing surpasses the sheer magnitude of the argument forwarded here. Toffler marshalls a virtual mountain of evidence illustrating his claim of a rising flood of techniological, social, and economic change, largely emanating from the increasing influence of science and technology into every area of contemporary life.

Toffler's main concern is with the recognition that while a human being's capacity to adjust physically, psychologically, and socially to this torrent of change is finite and quite limited, the pace of change is increasing and expanding into more and more areas of individuals' lives. Moreover, no one is asking for these profound and endless changes; they stem more from the economic impulses of the marketplace than from any kind of consumer demand, and perhaps we should be asking to what extent this flood of innovations actually enhances our lives, and personal convenience associated with all these innovations and technological improvements are worth the social, economic, and political change that follows in its wake.

The term "future shock" refers to what happens when people are no longer able to cope with the pace of change. All sorts of symptoms and maladies results, ranging from depression to bizarre behavior to increases in susceptability to disease to absolute emotional breakdown. Thus, Toffler accurately anticipated many of the sorts of psychological, social, and economic maldies and turbulence of the last thirty years. Yet, to date literally no one seems to pay much heed to his thesis, or to ask what it means for the quality of life in our own futures. This is an important book raising critical and fundamental questions about the social, economic, and political impacts of technologically-induced innovations within contemporary society and the way they are flooding uncontested and unhampered into our social environment. This is a must-read for any serious student of social science.

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Summary: What a trashy printing of a good book
Review: It's criminal that good books are printed on awful paper (is that reprocessed vomit?) in microscopic, smudgy type... and a poorly selected typeface. It interferes unnecessarily with comprehension. Bantam - shame on you. Readers- look for a used hardcover.

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Summary: High tech, High touch in the Internet society
Review: On the Internet, it's no longer true that 'no one knows you're a dog'. Early Internet communication usually took the form of email or online chat; now it's not enough. Intra-company and intra-joint-venture communication that uses the Internet as its main medium is increasingly shifting to voice. Stranglely, people want to talk to a real person and thereby 'personalize' and increase the intimacy of the relationship. High tech, high touch says Toffler; this is an example from 1998. The voice can be telephone or IP telephony from PC to PC. In any case it is a decrease in anonymity and an increase in humanization. Toffler continues to be correct.