BOOK REVIEW – FUTURE SHOCK (ALVIN TOFFLER)
INTRODUCTION:
Future Shock, a book written by Alvin Toffler way back in 1970, takes a futuristic view and tries to assess the times to come. It’s a descriptive narrative of the way the writer envisions the society to adapt, or to not adapt the changes it will encounter in future. The writer reasons that change is happening at an accelerating pace, and thus, it becomes highly imperative to be ready to meet the change well prepared. He also cites examples where the majority is not comfortable to this idea of having to adopt a change, and thus, landing in a situation where they are ill prepared to face this juggernaut, resulting in them meeting with “future shock”. The arrival of future is inevitable, and is compounded by the fact that it’s arriving at a fast pace in terms of the quantum of change it carries. Right from the changes in family structure to that in the organizations, there’s a heightened need to sensitize everyone who will be a part of the future, to be prepared to embrace the change. The writer, based on his interpretation of the arriving change, brought about by the cues presented to him in the various behaviors exhibited during his times, cautions everyone to be on their toes welcoming the change. If well accepted, this change will carry the power to transform. The writer also talks about the need to adapt, which will aid us in facing the changing trends in a much better way. He reasons that earlier the mankind learns the ways to adapt to a change and control the rate of change, the better it is; otherwise, the society is doomed to massive adaptational breakdown. The writer impresses on the fact that the racing rate of change has not only altered structures, but has impacted personal lives as well, which compels us to act out new roles, and confronts us with the possibility of a new disease, which he famously calls as “future shock”. He describes it as the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of future. He talks of a scenario which is akin to the whole society being transported into an uncertain future, which will result in mass disorientation because the generation will be ill prepared for change. This he calls the case of an ‘unprepared visitor”. He quite interestingly calls the time of 70s as the 800th lifetime and goes on to say that most of the material goods used by mankind as of today have been developed in this 800th lifetime. He charts out the way the world has moved away from agriculture to industrialization to the now renowned services sector. Whole of world, he argues, is so closely knit now that the effects of some occurrence radiate almost instantaneously, and the past almost seems to be doubling back on us. He associates this fast arrival of change with a phenomenon called social progeria, famously influenced from a human condition where senility strikes at a much younger age. He marks that vast majority of people, including educated and sophisticated people, deny the existence of change. This change is visible almost everywhere, be it industrialization, advancement in science and technology, urbanization or energy consumption. And it’s not only the dimension of change which is a cause of worry for the future generations, but the speed at which this change is coming. He proclaims that if we don’t plan out things and adapt according to our estimates, we are going to face an adaptational breakdown.
THE DEATH OF PERMANENCE:
The writer starts his journey with a comment on the trends of change. Picking on the cues, he is quite flustered with the way majority of mankind is oblivious of the change about to come. He is also quite amazed to find that intellectually oriented people, who have the knowledge to identify the avalanche of change coming their way, and have done so, are turning a blind eye towards it, only for the fear that change seems too threatening to them. It’s quite akin to the proverbial characteristic of an ostrich on spotting its enemy, where it digs its head into the sand and thinks it’s safe from all dangers. They fail to realize that the arrival of change is inevitable and one needs to be better prepared to welcome it, more so when it’s arriving at such a rapid pace. There’s no place of constant behavior anymore. Permanence has been laid to rest by this rapidity of change. We need to show enough gumption to accept this change. The writer talks about the last 50,000 years, where this rate of change started to pick up momentum and now is operating at full throttle, a juggernaut which promises to wipe out civilizations, societies and organizations, if they are not prepared to tackle it suitably. He calls the time he lives in as 800th lifetime, based on his structuring of the whole life span as blocks of 62 years. The writer’s analysis of the generic man is one of indifference and lackadaisical, where he is either not aware of this change marching towards him or is not ready to accept the change as it seems too threatening for their survival. He calls them unprepared visitors into the future. He draws a parallel with ‘culture shock’ where a person finds it difficult to associate his behavior into a society which is alien to him. He opines that it is relatively easier to deal with a culture shock as you get time to adapt and know very well that this is not going to last through the lifetime. But once faced with future shock, there’s no chance of retreat as the only dimension of measuring the rapidity of change is time, which can’t be retrieved again once it has elapsed. Thus, this unprepared visitor faces a much larger problem, for which the onus lies on him to react and be prepared to adapt. Otherwise, the juggernaut will sway everything in its way.
THE ACCELERATIVEE THRUST:
The writer is of the view that to take stock of the enormity of the situation we will be faced with in future, we need to analyze our past and see through our present to gauge the rate at which change is happening. The start would ideally be very slow, as would be anybody’s guess, as we started to record our writings. Then we got used to watching changes happening over the years, then months, weeks, days and now hours. The quantum of change happening in the earlier phases, which took years to materialize, is now happening in days and hours. This is a clear indicator of how the change has been provided with an accelerative thrust. Time is the currency of exchange that makes it possible to compare the rates at which very different processes play themselves out. Change is observable because it happens in discrete intervals of time and doesn’t happen all at once. Rate of change refers to the number of events crowded into an arbitrarily fixed interval of time. This accelerative thrust has manifested in mankind’s energy consumption patterns, urbanization and science and technology. The rates at which urbanization is happening and cities are coming up are indicative of what lies ahead. Same is the case with advancement in technology. The writer points out that the mankind has used knowledge as a fuel to drive this change and this rate of gaining knowledge is increasing by the day, indicated by the increase in production volumes of scientific journals. With the advent of computers, the way knowledge is stored is going to see an unprecedented change. Francis Bacon’s “Knowledge is power” has been suitably modified by the writer to “Knowledge is change”.
The pace of life:
The idea of change involves an important dimension of pace of life. This encompasses the concept of the people of future who race through their lives and keep the pace accelerating. They are almost similar to wound-up toys with keys on their backs, which could be controlled in terms of how they pace their movements. Not all people are familiar with this heightened pace and attract strong and contrasting reactions from different people. The writer classifies the inhabitants of the earth by their position in time. He chooses to call the agriculturists, people of past, which form close to 70% of the total inhabitants. He refers to the industrialized population as the people from present, which account for the next 25% of the whole sample. The remaining 2 or 3% are people neither from past or the present. They represent the people who have made advancement into the future, pacing their lives at the higher end. They live like the people of future. They are advance agents of man, the earliest citizens of the worldwide super industrial society now in the throes of birth. They distinguish themselves in a sense that they are already caught up in a new, stepped up pace of life. They live faster than the people around them. Some people have conditioned themselves to this fast pace and feel quite anxious when the pace slows down. They are always in the need to be in the fast lane of life. It comes all too naturally to them. The writer attributes this propensity towards fast life to the phenomenon of brain drain. The mass migration of European scientists to US and Canada, is not only due to the availability of better prospects for employment or better standard of living, but also because they deem these places to be fast paced, which matches to their requirements.
The society is increasingly moving towards a culture of using temporary products. Right from the paper napkins, nappies to TV dinners, everything seems to be finding its way to the trash can once they have been used. The idea of using a product once and then replacing it seems to be the way forward. The transience is characterized by a sense of vanishing past, impermanence, rental revolution and temporary needs.
There are glimpses of future to be had in the way fast paced executives are the new generation nomads. They take pride in their lives enjoying the best of two worlds, transferring themselves from one location to another for the sake of work-life balance. As more and more nomads come into the game, it is anybody’s guess, how it would be in the future, with these messengers of future regaling us with such frequent transits. People are travelling more, with their yearly averages more than the total distance travelled by men in early 1900s in their entire lifetime! People are migrating and relocating more than ever before. This is one of the effects of the nomadic way of life these futuristic people have come to live with.
The author goes on talk about how organizations would be impacted by this change. Contrary to the popular belief that bureaucracy is going to rule the roost for time immemorial, Toffler argues that we have started to witness the collapse of bureaucracy and we are witnessing the arrival of a new organizational structure, which will increasingly challenge and ultimately supplant bureaucracy. Such a system is called “Ad-hocracy”. The author talks about organizational upheaval – constant refurbishing of an organization due to mergers and acquisitions. Organizations will always remain in the race to position themselves as the face of consumer market place undergoes a change. As organizations change, person’s organizational relationships also undergo a change. These relationships are less permanent and more temporary. Organization upheaval results in formation of projects, where teams are organized to perform specific short term tasks. Once these team accomplish their tasks, they are dismantled and their components, i.e. team members are reshuffled to be a part of some other project team. Thus, these projects or teams are temporary by design. Organizations themselves are witnessing a change in how power is distributed among its stakeholders. From a more hierarchical, top-down power structure, organizations are becoming flatter. The need for this is engendered in the fact that as productivity increases and organizations remain committed to increasing it further, they can’t afford the delays in transmission of information from the ‘hands’ to the ‘brains’ of the organization. Organizations can’t afford to have longer durations of downtime and this need for more information at higher speeds undermines the vertical hierarchies.
The way we interpret and use information is also changing. We are overwhelmed with the kind of coverage celebrities get to seep into our minds and be our vicarious friends. We tend to associate feeling which we ideally have for our real friends. But this effect, engendered due this sort of information dissemination, has always been short lived. Then we need to answer the question of how much information needs to be passed on for benefit of the seeker. Advertising is creating pressure on its viewers to retain images to the maximum capacity. Vocabulary is experiencing a welcome change with words constantly being put into or taken out for consistency.
Author drives the point home that we have been through a lot of change, and we are in the midst of super industrial revolution. Science is undergoing a paradigm shift where it can become a life creator. He also talks how micro biology is going to play a big role in the scheme of things in future. We will be in a position to replicate ourselves through cloning .
Author takes us to the concept of Information overload. As the surrounding environment keeps on changing at a rapid speed, humans need to process more information at much higher speeds to keep pace with the deluge of information. This tests our limits of adaptability. This presents us with a challenge to ready ourselves for the change about to arrive and show our competence in handling its changing ways. Psychologically if we manage to tame this beast, we would have the upper hand in the race against keeping pace with future.
Contrary to this, we have some victims of future shock as well. They are in constant state of denial and their strategy hinges on blocking out the unwelcome reality. Another trait forces them to specialize in not all dimensions of absorbing future shock, but only one. They energetically try to keep pace with change but run the risk of fighting against all odds to not get swayed by the enormity of change. Moreover, the victim could be a reversionist, who keeps to his previously programmed beliefs with dogmatic desperation. He always craves for the comfort of the past, where he was not disillusioned by any thought of change, only because he was never required to!
Finally, the author feels compelled to provide succor to those who are bound to struggle in this duel against rapid change. He enlists his interpretation of what happen to be the ways of impeding the effects of future shock. He envisions various way of coping with tomorrow. One of them is direct coping, where we need to realize that conscious efforts of fighting against change would take us a long way in this battle. This could be brought about by appraising our performance in dealing with change. We could take a look at our inner self, changes occurring in the outside environment and gauge the level of tuning it requires to meet the challenges in the face. We could also look at taming technology to our advantage. Updating ourselves with the latest would go a long way in defining how we handle the arrival of change.
KEY LEARNING FROM THE BOOK:
1. Change is inevitable. We must learn to adapt to it.
2. We must always keep on updating ourselves with the changing trends in our social, political and economical environment. This will help us in keeping pace with the change and mark our foray into the future as a prepared person.
3. We must come out of our state of denial to recognize the change happening around us and update ourselves accordingly.
4. Once we have picked up on the cues and have spotted the changing trends, we must strive to be the messengers of future by incorporating changes which are very basic to our sustained existence in future.
5. Having understood the gravity of the consequences of an imminent collision with invading future, we must leverage our learning in the society to help them keep abreast with the rapidly marching future.
6. It requires a visionary to pick on cues and predict the changes about to arrive in future.
7. We must establish some sense of permanence in our day-to-day lives, for it leads us away from nomadic ways of life and helps foster stronger relationship with various elements of our environment.
8. Organizations must be ready with contingency plans in the wake of being faced with any eventuality. They must be flexible enough to mould into any role as per the gravity of the requirement.
9. We must be well equipped to handle fast paced life and the information overload associated with it.
10. Now that we have the capability of creating lives, we must not try to play GOD. The repercussions could be catastrophic.
11. We must attach great value to the family value system, keep them close, foster in-depth and permanent relationships.
12. We must not act drawn away from the happenings of present and the inevitability of future, as it doesn’t give us the freedom to choose a deserving future.
13. Times are going to be stressful, so there’s a need to take cognizance of this situation and prepare us mentally to cope with it. Such anticipatory information would go a long way in determining how well we handle stress.
14. We must stick to some preconceived notions of problem solving. The dynamics of changing environment requires us to be flexible and receptive of the various cues it provides to deal with a new problem. Any sort of fixation would invite trouble for us.
15. We need to come out of our comfort zones to challenge the existing beliefs and accept the ways which are going to be common and rational in future.
16. We must consult counselors in case of any mid life crisis.
17. We must harbor enclaves of the past so that in the case of any calamity, strays of past get passed onto the future.
18. We need to inculcate in our children a futuristic approach, which gives them a head start in the race against changing future.
19. New educational institutions must burgeon with a single motive of probing the future for the sake of present. They will be the mirror to the future through which children of today will be taking a leap into the troubled waters of what lies ahead.
20. Technology must be used to our advantage so that the transition into the future is smooth and any future shocks must be absorbed by them.
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