Future Shock

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American author Alvin Toffler first used the term future shock in 1965 to refer to the psychological disorientation and physical stress experienced by individuals and societies when radical changes occur within short periods of time. In Future Shock, the 1970 book that popularized the term, Toffler argued that human beings have limited abilities to adapt to social and technological transformations. Thus, he argued, it was the rate of alteration in personal and social life, and not just the direction of change, that posed unique psychological challenges to contemporary human beings.

Toffler believed that future shock would become a common psychological and physical state in advanced industrialized nations due to the speed with which technologies were transforming all aspects of society. In 1970 he already saw what he perceived as symptoms of future shock. These included an increasing impermanence in everything from interpersonal relationships to the life of institutions, a rise in individual and collective mobility, an increase in social diversity, and an acceleration in the consumption of goods and novel experiences. Toffler believed that these changes might soon outstrip human abilities to cope with them. For that reason, he argued that societies must actively manage the technological and social changes under way.

Soon after the publication of Future Shock, the title concept became a staple of popular writing on technological change. In the scholarly literature, researchers deployed the term within the field of organizational theory to address the possible consequences of technological change in the workplace and the possibility that they could be effectively managed. Education scholars also invoked the concept as they studied how to prepare students for the rapid changes taking place in society. Though it remained popular in the organizational and educational literature, the concept of future shock never developed analytical purchase across the social sciences. As the Internet came on the scene in the mid-1990s, however, the term saw a brief resurgence. By the late 1990s, it was often used by political scientists studying Internet-based political processes and trying to forecast the effects of technological change in that arena.

Within the social sciences, many of the phenomena Toffler pointed to in 1970 have been subsumed under other analytical paradigms. Writing at about the same time as Toffler, sociologists Alain Touraine (1971) and Daniel Bell (1973) pointed to the rise of postindustrial society. In the mid-1990s, sociologist Manuel Castells argued that the network society has emerged. In the movement from postindustrial to network society, scholars have integrated many of Toffler’s concerns with the consequences of technological change, but they have let go of the core features of future shock: the notion that the pace of change might outstrip human adaptability and the recommendation that change should be managed on that account.

SEE ALSO Futurology

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books.

Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Toffler, Alvin. 1965. The Future as a Way of Life. Horizon 7 (3): 108–115.

Toffler, Alvin. 1970. Future Shock. New York: Random House.

Touraine, Alain. 1971. The Postindustrial Society: Tomorrow’s Social History—Classes, Conflicts, and Culture in the Programmed Society. Trans. Leonard F. X. Mayhew. New York: Random House.

Daniel Kreiss

Fred Turner

fu·ture shock • n. a state of distress or disorientation due to rapid social or technological change.