Book review Future Shock

"Man Has A Limited Biological Capacity Of Change. When Is Capacity Is Overwhelmed, The Capacity Is In Future Shock"

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GENRE: Guide, Social Economics

AUTHOR: Alvin Toffler

PAGES: 286                                        

PUBLICATION YEAR: 1970

RELATED BOOKS: Smart Mobs, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Cyberia

About the Author

Alvin Toffler turned into an American writer and futurist, recognized for his works discussing the virtual revolution, communications revolution, company revolution and technological singularity. A  former   accomplice editor of Fortune magazine, his early work targeted on era and its impact (thru outcomes like facts overload.

Accenture, the management consultancy, has dubbed him the 0.33 maximum influential voice amongst commercial enterprise leaders, after invoice Gates and Peter Drucker. He has also been defined within the monetary instances as the "world's maximum well-known futurologist".

Summary Of Future Shock

Future Shock is about what happens when people are exposed to change. It is about the ways in which people adapt or fail to adapt to the future. It argues, unless people quickly learn to control the rate of change in his personal, professional & social affairs at a large scale, they are doomed to a massive adaptive breakdown. 

The initial phase of the book describes the "Death of Permanence". Our generation is witnessing a massive bombardment of change in a very short span to mentally orient. Staring from the things we use, place we live, people surrounding us, and so on, everything in transit. The rate of progress suddenly paced compared to our forty thousand years of existence. With the increase in the transience of commodities and lifestyle, it is getting reflected at the social front as well. The duration of human relations is reducing. We are configuring ourselves to a modular approach to deal with changes. An example of a fountain pen versus ball pen was put forward to make readers understand what is modularity, better to be called throw away society. 

 

Further, the book discusses about "Novelty". The scientific trajectory of our civilization, where microbiology & genetics will take the wheel in the future. So, the next course of change will be internal. Transit organs, aqua-farming, personalized offspring’s, parenting will witness 180-degree swing and much more sci-fi stuff. 

In this section, Alvin talked about what triggers people to welcome change. What happens when something in our environment is altered? 

 

All of us are constantly bombarded shower of signals from our environment—visual, auditory, tactile, etc.  When something changes within the range of our senses, the pattern of signals pouring through our sensory channels into our nervous system is modified. The routine, repetitive patterns are interrupted—and to this interruption, we respond in a particularly acute fashion.

The final part is "Recommendations" It described the biological limitations of humans coping with change. How to respond to novelty and adaptive reactions. Structuring of an educational institution for the future. It also discussed how culture and technology can go together.

Book Review Of Future Shock 

I was amazed, this book was written in the 1970s makes so much sense today. People keep on chanting "change" & "being agile or you will perish" kind of stuff. It sounds vague as their arguments remain uni-dimensional. 

 

Future Shock is able to cover all the aspects of humanity undergoing the roller coaster of alterations. It is so fun to read a reader can relate his life, the transition he witnessed around him from childhood to the present. The part where my eyes got big was our future. The writer took today's practice and predicted our coming time. It was so convincing as if you are actually a part of it. Sometime readers may feel if the content is getting repeated but patience is the key because every chapter is a completely new dimension relating to other things. 

This book will you give extreme clarity about what is currently happening around & how to deal with it. I am literally forcing my close ones to read this book.  Looking forward to reading other books by Alvin Toffler.

Quotes from Future Shock

• “You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.”

• “Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults.”

• “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

• “The illiterate of the 21st Century are not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

• “The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.”

• “Our moral responsibility is not to stop the future, but to shape it...to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.”

• “It does little good to forecast the future of semiconductors or energy, or the future of the family (even one's own family), if the forecast springs from the premise that everything else will remain unchanged. For nothing will remain unchanged. The future is fluid, not frozen. It is constructed by our shifting and changing daily decisions, and each event influences all others.”

• “The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.”

• “If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion.”

• “Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama.”

• “You've got to think about 'big things' while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.”

 

 

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