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Future Shock [Mass Market Paperback]

Alvin Toffler
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)

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Book Description

June 1, 1984
Examines the effects of rapid industrial and technological changes upon the individual, the family, and society.

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Future Shock + The Third Wave + Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century
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Product Details

  • Mass Market Paperback: 576 pages
  • Publisher: Bantam; 1 edition (June 1, 1984)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0553277375
  • ISBN-13: 978-0553277371
  • Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.9 x 6.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #160,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
141 of 147 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Must Reading For Any Concerned Citizen! May 25, 2000
Format:School & Library Binding|Amazon Verified Purchase
It is a pleasant surprise to see that this book has been reissued as a hardcover. In the thrity years since its original publication, the basic truths and awesome prognositications have largely come to pass. Of course, in the process Mr. Toffler has become something of a cottage industry himself, since publishing several sequels (The Third Wave, Power Shift, etc.). Yet nothing surpasses the sheer magnitude of the argument forwarded here. Toffler marshalls a virtual mountain of evidence illustrating his claim of a rising flood of techniological, social, and economic change, largely emanating from the increasing influence of science and technology into every area of contemporary life.

Toffler's main concern is with the recognition that while a human being's capacity to adjust physically, psychologically, and socially to this torrent of change is finite and quite limited, the pace of change is increasing and expanding into more and more areas of individuals' lives. Moreover, no one is asking for these profound and endless changes; they stem more from the economic impulses of the marketplace than from any kind of consumer demand, and perhaps we should be asking to what extent this flood of innovations actually enhances our lives, and personal convenience associated with all these innovations and technological improvements are worth the social, economic, and political change that follows in its wake.

The term "future shock" refers to what happens when people are no longer able to cope with the pace of change. All sorts of symptoms and maladies results, ranging from depression to bizarre behavior to increases in susceptability to disease to absolute emotional breakdown.... Read more ›

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79 of 87 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Shock This!! December 3, 2001
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Alvin Toffler is one crackerjack sociologist. He wrote a series of books concerning the direction of society, the first being this book, Future Shock. Future Shock was written in 1970, and it must have caused a sensation at the time. Toffler examines so many sociological issues that the mere scope of this book is mind-boggling. Toffler went on to write The Third Wave and Powershift, both of which I have not read. While some of Toffler's theories in this book did not pan out, most the observations he makes are eerily true.

Toffler's main argument is that humanity, as of 1970, is in the midst of an enormous shift from an industrial society to a super-industrial society. This new society will be characterized by such things as an acceleration of images, words, ideas, and technologies that could possibly overwhelm mankind (Sound familiar? Watch the news tonight and see how many graphics float by on the screen). Mankind will suffer a serious disconnect when these new ideas reach their fruition (if not well before then). This disconnect is "future shock," an inability to process the enormous amounts of information and change associated with the super-industrial revolution. Toffler likens future shock to the same sort of disorientation that a person experiences when he moves to a new area, or a new country, and suffers a severing of all he has known. While some people can adjust with seeming ease to this kind of dislocation, most of us suffer various maladies from this "shock." Toffler ends up attributing most of societies ills to this jarring social shock. Crime, drug use, the disintegration of society, the burgeoning of quasi-religious movements: all of these are symptoms of a society that can no longer cope with the vast amounts of information and change that technology is bringing about....

These changes involve education, work, government and other dimensions of life. Toffler believes that we should not be afraid to scrap massive sections of any of these areas if doing so can improve our chances of adjusting and functioning within the new society. Toffler proposes forming numerous groups that would deal exclusively with trying to take charge of the situation so that a safer, slower future will come about. Toffler even supports oversight of technology so that any new products or ideas can be examined to determine their effects on society at large (a big no-no to big business).

Some of Toffler's visions are pretty impressive. Toffler predicts that work will increasingly be made up of short-range ad hoc committees that would tackle specific problems within a company. This is certainly true today, although the hierarchy is still alive and well in the business community. Toffler also saw the explosion in the entertainment industry, even though some of his ideas are pretty weird and have yet to be realized. Such ideas as genetic engineering and cloning are still in the formative stages, but Toffler mentions them here as well. One of the more interesting observations in this book concerns the structure of the family. Toffler sees divorce as a problem, and he proposes the idea of short-term contractual marriages as a possible solution. I whole-heartedly support this idea if it doesn't involve alimony payments! He also believes that children could be farmed out to families whose sole purpose in society would be to take care of kids. Kind of like daycare, except the little rugrats won't come home at the end of the day.

There really isn't any reason to read this book today unless you're a sociologist, interested in seeing the same old day-to-day stuff in a new way, or just interested in seeing how freaky some of Toffler's ideas are. Mr. Toffler does come off as a huge socialist, and that's a bit scary. Still, this is an intelligent book written in an easy style. You could do a lot worse than reading this one. Read more ›

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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful
By Bugs
Format:Mass Market Paperback
This book was first published in 1970 and was a call to take heed of the looming "Future Shock" or backlash of humanities biggest, unresolved dilemmas such as: the widening disparity between rich and poor, ie, the wealth of the world being monopolized by smaller and smaller percentage of the world human population, while the growing number of poor or outright poverty stricken are growing by leaps and bounds; burgeoning human population pressures with it's ever-increasing demands on limited resources; pollution of the food chains; technology with it's blessings and baggage of intrusive, dehumanizing side-effects; world health crisis, etc.

While humanity is currently preferring to live in a state of denial about the impending backlash of the mostly human-caused problems facing our present and immediate future, there is a growing accumulation of data never historically available to us before on how to deal with our problems. Will we put this knowledge to use in time?

So what exactly is "Future Shock"? Toffler explains: "We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and it's decision-making processes. Put more simply, future shock is the human response to over-stimulation". Overload= breakdown! The socio-political, economic and environmental bills are coming due and they WILL be paid, shocking or not!

Toffler sees that our time consuming, stressed-out, hyper-industrial, compulsive consuming society is leaving parents no time for proper child rearing- as if they were qualified for the task in the first place.
... Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars the future is here
This will teach you to pay attention to those who make educated predictions about the future. This book came out my senior year of high school (1971) describing what the near... Read more
Published 11 days ago by claire a corcoran
5.0 out of 5 stars Great condition, fast shipping
This is still an interesting read after all these years, and well worth a look. I'm happy with this purchase.
Published 17 days ago by Mark C. Chapin
3.0 out of 5 stars This is the future
We're already living in the future predicted. I guess we were already living in it when he wrote the book. Read more
Published 2 months ago by dm
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting as a Historical Document
If you want a slice of how people looked at the world in 1970, this is a good resource. Everyone thought of the future in gloomy, apocalyptic, science fiction-like terms: it was... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Chuck
4.0 out of 5 stars Poison into Elixer--still relevant today
OVERALL THESIS & METHOD OF BOOK
In 1970 Toffler extrapolated major technological trends, concluding that humanity (with the US and industrialized nations as bellwethers) was... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Neal J. Pollock
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the few predictive books written in the seventies still worth...
Toffler was one of the first people to accurately describe the phenomenon he called "future shock" which referred to the modern trend of the future arriving faster than people... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Charles Ashbacher
4.0 out of 5 stars This was written in 1970????
I had read this book when it came out ..........I was in Hi School and it blew my mind as well as any of the other mind altering substances available. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Doug
5.0 out of 5 stars Future Shock, Present Shock
I read this book back in college and viewed it then as a book that most resembled science fiction. Many things within this book has come to pass and there is still more to come.
Published 17 months ago by Denny Jackson
4.0 out of 5 stars Technology: Friend, Foe or somewhere in-between?
I cannot believe how much Future Shock is a part of my background. While reading it I remembered direct quotes spoken by my mother and teachers; it was hugely popular in the 70's. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Sean Meriwether
5.0 out of 5 stars The Shocking Future: Are you becoming Obsolete?
This is a visionary work of literature, that was written in 1970. What is amazing is the realities of today that this author has so accurately captured 40 years ago. Read more
Published on November 22, 2010 by G. Max Gooding
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