Future Shock

_Future Shock_ is one of those books that always seemed to be on the table at every used bookstore, flea market, and garage sale. The brightly colored cover made it easy to spot, and the breathless tagline, "this book can help the US survive our collision with tomorrow," made it just as easy to write off as hokey predictions about "The Future" from the vantage point of early 1970's. But I'm here to argue that it is definitely worth your time.

Despite appearances, this is not a book of weird, absurdly anachronistic predictions, but I will admit that I thought it would be. Instead, Toffler states, unequivocally, that "[n]o serious futurist deals in 'predictions'" (p.5). He is instead offering a case for adaptation to technological change. show more

It does not take long to see that Toffler is not dealing in predictions. Rather, he seems to be offering extrapolations based on interpretation of then-current events. And this might be a fine line but how far away from current events do forecasts need to be before they become predictions? If I see a glass of water falling off the counter, is it a prediction that it will break or an extrapolation of the available facts? Similarly, if I see colleagues working long hours and bringing work home on mobile devices, is it a prediction that they are heading toward burnout or extrapolation? Toffler operates in this gray space but rarely makes predictions that are wildly speculative or outlandish based on the information he is drawing upon (and citing!)

Toffler argues that acceleration, transcience, novelty, and diversity are what I think of as change conditions. They describe the character of changes in our relationships to technology, to family, to work, to entertainment, to government, to all aspects of our lives. Across all of these realms, Toffler offers an astonishingly specific and referenced body of research showing that these changes were/are happening and can make it more difficult for individuals to adapt. Instead of adapting, Toffler finds evidence that people are, at best, coping with accelerated change by building "enclaves" of stability where we seek out sameness, quiet, habit, and ritual (e.g., pp. 377, 390).

Toffler's solution is, among other things, doing futurism, a "conditioned ability to look ahead" (p.419) that helps us see where adaptation will be needed. How to adapt is a different problem, but Toffler lays out an intriguing solution in the form of what he calls "Anticipatory Democracy," which essentially amounts to localized, situated groupings of experts and non-experts, anyone who has a stake in and who is close to the issue at hand. It is through this decentralized, democratic investigation of the wicked problems that the future offers that adaptation is possible.

... and there are also some weirdly blasé sections about extramarital affairs, including how personalized AI can help us be better at them. So, the book is not totally without some oddities. show less

Over the years I've read dozens of books that referenced this one, so figured it was high time to expose myself firsthand to the source material. Written at the tail end of the tumultuous 1960's, I was bracing for it to be wildly dated and not very relevant. While there are a few comically far-fetched predictions of how the next few decades would play out, overall he absolutely nailed it.

Several sections would have been prescient in 1999, let alone 1969. It's almost as if he had a time machine and saw how the internet, social media, identity politics, and AI would converge to create a society with extreme social diversity, personalized news bubbles, and a proliferation of tight-knit "sub-cults," fracturing the façade of societal unity show more and leading to a "cracked consensus." Half of the hand-wringing think pieces from 2017 in the wake of trump's victory were essentially verbatim quotes from this book.

Despite having largely been proven right, sadly too much of what he cautions us about is still unresolved, despite the half century we've had to fix things. From education and employment, economics and housing, to the environment, media, and the military-industrial complex, we still have a ways to go. And this book therefore still merits a place on the Must-Read shelf, both for its historical significance, it's eerily accurate predictions, and the lessons still to be learned. show less

One of the first "big thinking" books I read, and read it twice as an early-2o's still-teenager.

Largely true today and written back in the stone age, what, the 1970's?

I would still recommend it to those turning to face the facebook world, alienation and over choice.

If Alvin Toffler had authored this book in 2020, I may have dismissed this as a rant, and there are many people these days who are ranting about things like social media with all its attendant problems.

However, he wrote this book in 1970, and many of the things that he describes have come to pass.

It is scary to note that this book was so prescient. It was a book that created shock waves at the time that it was published. It is a book to read even now, for its timely warning of what can happen to us if we are not on our guard.
50 years on, it is still relevant.

Ignore the year of publication and rest assured — you’re sure to learn something of interest from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Outside of a few dated terms, much of what Toffler speaks to — the social, economic, political, and technological trends of the past, present and future — are addressed through their functional and affective aspects rather than broad speculation over the physical forms and precise implementations to which they are to take. For a book written in 1970, there’s still plenty of relevant information in here to think about.

Toffler begins by giving us a broad overview of the state of contemporary society as it stood just as the USA’s golden age was coming to a close. Much of the initial chapters provide show more overviews of the sociological and psychosocial viewpoints of an uprooted and hyperactive tech-enabled “technosociety” (one of a few dated terms). Touching on the subjects of alienation, grounding, values and belief systems, a la carte lifestyles, political representation and knowledge, Toffler leaves no stone unturned as he exposes to us to the stark realities of the social dysfunction already well underway at the time of publication. Though it paints a rather bleak image of the future, much of what he speaks to remains entirely relevant today.

Following the bleak evaluation of the foreseeable future insofar as he sees it, Toffler then speaks to the positive benefits and revelations that change is capable of producing. His case for the essential nature of change is well put though, at best, merely levels the scale between the pros and cons of our collective future.

The final bit Toffler falls to a slightly more speculative but entirely theoretical tone in which he discusses some of his own potential solutions to mitigating the worst case social scenarios first presented and to the essential tasks he deemed necessary for our successful, albeit inevitable, march forward in time. show less

Đây là một tác phẩm rất hay, dự báo về tương lai của xã hội siêu công nghiệp sắp đến, một cuộc cách mạng còn sâu rộng hơn cuộc cách mạng công nghiệp ở thế kỷ 17, 18, vì không chỉ ảnh hưởng đến kinh tế mà còn liên quan đến mọi khía cạnh khác của xã hội. Sự thay đổi của xã hội sắp đến không chỉ ở sự khác biệt so với hiện tại, mà còn là tốc độ của thay đổi, nó xảy ra với một nhịp độ đến chóng mặt, tác động không chỉ đối với từng cá nhân, mà còn đối với tập thể, quốc gia, tạo ra cái gọi là “Cú shock tương lai”, một từ do tác giả đưa ra, đã show more bắt đầu biến thành ngôn ngữ thông dụng trong báo chí, sách và cả từ điển. Cú sốc tương lai (Future Shock) là một trong bộ ba tác phẩm nổi tiếng đã đưa tác giả lên vị trí "nhà tương lai học lừng danh". show less

Well, let me say that the Bible is dull, stodgy, and mostly wrong, but it's considered a classic. So too with this work, but ...

I first read this book when I was in 8th grade, one year after it was published. I originally found it a tad outrageous but quite intriguing. I bought the major premise at that time that the amount of information being produced, disseminated, and consumed was increasing and would increase to frightening levels.

It IS dated, but Mr. Toffler is one of the few thinkers of his era who had an inkling of what was going to happen in the info-verse. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called "57 Channels and Nothin's On" which was meant to express the huge number of TV stations in a modern, technological world, and how show more vapid their content could be. Vapid content aside, the idea of "57 channels" was considered an absurd exaggeration. Now we have almost infinite channels (of information) and Springsteen's song seems quaint.

My career as a librarian spans 1989 to the present and I feel as if I've been straddling that part of Mr. Toffler's exponential curve where it turned upward and went frighteningly off the scale.

Welcome to 2009, and thanks for giving me fair warning Mr. Toffler. show less