Rating: 
Summary: Valuable scientific purpose
Review: The book "Future Shock" was written by Alvin Toffler in 1970 to stress the way the increased rate of change will affect people's lives and society in general. We will determine this book's value based on five criteria for scientific books. The criteria includes: scientific terminology is explained or clarified; the work is relevant and appeals to a wide audience; the significance and human value is evident; it is reliable, believable, and accurate; and it is organized logically with connection between ideas.
No scientific background is necessary in comprehending a valuable scientific book, nor does it contain a lot of unexplained terminology. This book does not include a lot of scientific terms, but it does include some phraseology and some big words. An example of phraseology seen in this book is, "The only way to maintain any semblance of equilibrium during the super-industrial revolution will be to . . . design new personal and social change-regulators." This sentence shows how the author uses phraseology (change-regulators) and big words (semblance). These words are not explained so this may confuse the reader and result in a lack of understanding for the author's point.
All important works are relevant and appeal to a wide audience. "Future Shock" meets this standard because it's relevance and appeal are obvious. This book's relevance is that all people are affected by change, whether they know it or not. The wide audience appeal comes from Toffler's prediction of what the future holds for society. These characteristics are vital to the value of this book.
In order for this book to be valuable, the significance and human value must be evident. This book's significance is that Alvin Toffler is the first to make people aware that the rate of change is increasing at such a phenomenal rate that it is changing people's lives and the structure of society. The human value is obviously that by becoming aware of this accelerated rate of change we can decide how this pace will affect us individually and as a society.
Another way to determine if a book possesses value is if it's reliable, believable, and accurate. "Future Shock" makes references to other scientists and researchers throughout the book to explain where certain facts and opinions emerged. By doing this, Toffler makes his research reliable, believable, and even accurate.
A book that is organized logically with connection between ideas is considered to be valuable. This book is organized into six parts with several chapters in each part. Each chapter is broken up into subheadings and categories. Each category leads to the next category; each chapter leads to the next chapter; and each part leads to the next part. This method of organization and connecting ideas is a valuable way to clarify ideas.
Alvin Toffler's book, "Future Shock" is a valuable scientific book that appeals to a wide audience. Although some parts may be filled with phraseology and unexplained scientific terminology, this book is organized logically to provide understanding for the reader. Toffler's ideas are considered to be significant because his information and research is reliable, believable, and accurate.
Rating:
Summary: Valuable scientific purpose
Review: The book "Future Shock" was written by Alvin Toffler in 1970 to stress the way the increased rate of change will affect people's lives and society in general. We will determine this book's value based on five criteria for scientific books. The criteria includes: scientific terminology is explained or clarified; the work is relevant and appeals to a wide audience; the significance and human value is evident; it is reliable, believable, and accurate; and it is organized logically with connection between ideas.
No scientific background is necessary in comprehending a valuable scientific book, nor does it contain a lot of unexplained terminology. This book does not include a lot of scientific terms, but it does include some phraseology and some big words. An example of phraseology seen in this book is, "The only way to maintain any semblance of equilibrium during the super-industrial revolution will be to . . . design new personal and social change-regulators." This sentence shows how the author uses phraseology (change-regulators) and big words (semblance). These words are not explained so this may confuse the reader and result in a lack of understanding for the author's point.
All important works are relevant and appeal to a wide audience. "Future Shock" meets this standard because it's relevance and appeal are obvious. This book's relevance is that all people are affected by change, whether they know it or not. The wide audience appeal comes from Toffler's prediction of what the future holds for society. These characteristics are vital to the value of this book.
In order for this book to be valuable, the significance and human value must be evident. This book's significance is that Alvin Toffler is the first to make people aware that the rate of change is increasing at such a phenomenal rate that it is changing people's lives and the structure of society. The human value is obviously that by becoming aware of this accelerated rate of change we can decide how this pace will affect us individually and as a society.
Another way to determine if a book possesses value is if it's reliable, believable, and accurate. "Future Shock" makes references to other scientists and researchers throughout the book to explain where certain facts and opinions emerged. By doing this, Toffler makes his research reliable, believable, and even accurate.
A book that is organized logically with connection between ideas is considered to be valuable. This book is organized into six parts with several chapters in each part. Each chapter is broken up into subheadings and categories. Each category leads to the next category; each chapter leads to the next chapter; and each part leads to the next part. This method of organization and connecting ideas is a valuable way to clarify ideas.
Alvin Toffler's book, "Future Shock" is a valuable scientific book that appeals to a wide audience. Although some parts may be filled with phraseology and unexplained scientific terminology, this book is organized logically to provide understanding for the reader. Toffler's ideas are considered to be significant because his information and research is reliable, believable, and accurate.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant idea, but poorly developed.
Review: The idea of "future shock" is one of those rare concepts that has become *more* pertinent with the passage of time. The notion that an entire populace in a post-industrial society could find their capacity to adapt to their own (especially technological) developments outstripped by the very pace at which these devlopments occur is an idea that is even more supremely relevant today than when Toffler first identifed the phenomenon back in 1970.What a pity then, that he did not do his own thesis more justice. The book is divided into seven parts. Part I is a gripping read, sensibly argued, and a superb outline of the book's central point. In the next five parts, however, Toffler seems to get carried away, and the book gradually descends into unwarranted generalisations, wild speculations, unrestrained alarmism and recommendations that sometimes border on the surreal. By the final chapter, the reader will long have lost faith. I am not making the captious objection that a man writing almost thirty years ago about the rapid rate of change in the industrial world failed to predict correctly (a virtually impossible task for a book so long): I am simply saying that Toffler failed to predict *sensibly*. In short, he identified a palpable phenomenon, perhaps even *the* zeitgeist of the latter half of this century, but the claims that he made for its importance were so exaggerated and poorly thought out that the idea itself was not done any justice: one can almost hear the concept tearing at the seams as Toffler mangles it to fit his predictions. Read the book: the idea is certainly terrific, and you'll probably agree with the central concept. As regards Toffler's implications, you'll likely find yourself making up your own mind.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant idea, but poorly developed.
Review: The idea of "future shock" is one of those rare concepts that has become *more* pertinent with the passage of time. The notion that an entire populace in a post-industrial society could find their capacity to adapt to their own (especially technological) developments outstripped by the very pace at which these devlopments occur is an idea that is even more supremely relevant today than when Toffler first identifed the phenomenon back in 1970. What a pity then, that he did not do his own thesis more justice. The book is divided into seven parts. Part I is a gripping read, sensibly argued, and a superb outline of the book's central point. In the next five parts, however, Toffler seems to get carried away, and the book gradually descends into unwarranted generalisations, wild speculations, unrestrained alarmism and recommendations that sometimes border on the surreal. By the final chapter, the reader will long have lost faith. I am not making the captious objection that a man writing almost thirty years ago about the rapid rate of change in the industrial world failed to predict correctly (a virtually impossible task for a book so long): I am simply saying that Toffler failed to predict *sensibly*. In short, he identified a palpable phenomenon, perhaps even *the* zeitgeist of the latter half of this century, but the claims that he made for its importance were so exaggerated and poorly thought out that the idea itself was not done any justice: one can almost hear the concept tearing at the seams as Toffler mangles it to fit his predictions. Read the book: the idea is certainly terrific, and you'll probably agree with the central concept. As regards Toffler's implications, you'll likely find yourself making up your own mind.
Rating: 
Summary: Future Shock by Alvin Toffler
Review: The world has changed in many of the ways predicted by Toffler.
We are now in the throes of the super-industrial society
he spoke of in the early 1970s. For instance, computing power
has grown exponentially. There is a computer on every work
desk in most corporate offices. Children work with computers
at school. A growing number of people work at home. Electronics
has permeated virtually every part of society from home
calculators/computers to electronic panels in automobiles to super-stereo systems and advanced training systems in industry
and academe. Even childrens' games reflect the growing
sophistication of the super-industrialized world economy.
The internet has become the central repository of data.
Very few of these changes were imaginable from the perspective
of the early 1970s. The super industrial society will progress
technologically. Our challenge will require translating
the industrial progress into the creation of incremental
wealth for every segment of the society. Job re-design and
organizational dynamics have displaced workers and forced
re-training on the continued basis predicted by Toffler.
In fact, a central thesis of his book involved the fast rate
of change and its displacement of technical matter taught in primary school, high school and college. The super-industrialized
society will progress very much the way Toffler envisioned.
Our challenge will be to manage the change and utilize it to
improve the quality of our lives in every aspect previously
unattainable.
Rating:
Summary: bookreport
Review: title,rule of the characters,setting,plots,summary,moral lesson,contribution to the event,reaction.
Rating: 
Summary: Another outdated idea from the Sixties.
Review: Toffler coined the phrase "future shock" to describe the discomfiture of Americans who had grown up before the Second World War and were overwhelmed by the economic, technological and social changes sweeping over the U.S. by the late 1960's. For example, my father was born in 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, and grew up in a world before antibiotics, computers, nuclear power, jet travel, space lauches, etc. entered the material culture. He didn't get to see his first television broadcast until well into his 20's. So perhaps by the late 1960's he was feeling "future shock." I, by contrast, was born in 1959, and all of these things have been part of my environment in one way or another since then. A lot of the stuff considered "cutting edge" these days is based on ideas that had already worked out by the 1970's, though instantiated perhaps in unforeseen ways. The world I see around me in the early 21st Century hasn't really changed that much since my teens. It already sounds "retro" to refer to our time as the Jet/Atomic/Space/Information Age. And we are still struggling with a lot of chronic problems that haven't been solved through technological progress, like dependence on fossil fuels, even though we should have learned our lesson from what happened to the U.S. in the 1970's. So where is all the "future shock" I'm supposed to feel? Toffler's "classic" book reminds me of similar meretricious intellectual fads from the 1960's that few people take seriously these days, like the belief that the drug-tripping Counterculture was going to inaugurate a utopian society and nonsense of that sort. I suppose it has some historical interest as popular intellectualism from that era, along with books by the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Timothy Leary and Abraham Maslow. But it really doesn't describe the sort of world we live in.
Rating:
Summary: A timely work
Review: Toffler saw something important. He in 1970 saw that the accelerated pace of technological development would have a profound effect on the daily life of individuals. He understood that the disjunction between the technological changes and the human adaptation to them would be the source of major problems.
He understand that a new era of customization was bringing a variety to human choice, a kind of freedom which might in another sense take away freedom. He saw too the importance of ' information' and how it would be at the heart of transforming the world economy.
Toffler went on to write a number of other works about ' social change in the future' but this is by far the most interesting and profound one.
'Future Shock' is now a part of mankind's vocabulary and a continual element in our everyday life - experience.
Who knows what will come next and how wonderful or terrible it will be for us all?
Rating:
Summary: Few accurate predictions
Review: Toffler tells us that we will be given access to vast electronic databases right from our desks. So far, so good. He then goes on to explain how that will free us from the "lock step regimented" education system and allow children to work at their own pace any time and anywhere they feel like. Well, except for a small subset of the population (homeschoolers), schools are just as regimented as ever. Are you advanced, bored with your dumbed down classes - TOO BAD! sit there with everyone else, because your parents are busy working and there is no one else to take care of you! Toffler also tells us that we will be overwhelmed with information and that we will be so mobile that we will be constantly breaking relationships and starting new ones. This may be true again for a small subset of jetsetters in the population, but most folks spend their little lives in the same geographic confinds as always. Even the CEOs and other senior executives that I know still live within 100 miles of their childhood homes. The most mobile among us are scientists and engineers in highly specialized fields, but they are a small minority. In sum, I am sorry to say that the Toffler of 1970, if he had a chance to see into the future 30 years, would have been most shocked by how LITTLE has changed. I remember enjoying this book in the 1970s as I envisioned many of the advances Toffler talks about, and to some extent I have lived that dream more than most people, but today this book only serves to demonstrate how little the human race actually takes advantage of the many and great advances in technology.
Rating:
Summary: Alvin Toffler and his admirers have no sense of history.
Review: When Alvin Toffler first published Future Schock only a few readers caught the obvious absurdities: his assertion that knowledge is growing amazingly faster than ever before. Is he measuring pounds of books? Yards of periodicals on the shelves? Is he suggesting that Third Eye Blind has more knowlege of music than Bach or Beethoven? Has Bill Gates made a larger contribution to knowledge by creating Windows 95 than Galileo or Newton?
But to see people still excited by Tofler reveals the depth of historical ignorance in America. Almost any fifty year period in history from about the ninth century onward has seen change as dramatic or more so than we are witnessing: the invention of the plow, the metal stirrup, the screw attached to a wheel, the steam engine, electricity all caused massive upheavals in society.
The Black Plague, the Hundred Years War, the Inquisition, the Potato Famine must have created greater shocks than the downsizing of fat corporations, the increase in AIDS, the weakness of modern families.
Let's be conscious of the change going on around us, but responding to that change will be easier for people with a sense of history than for people who rely on the cant of for profit prophets like Tofler.
Hilary Smith
|
