‘Future Shock’ Author Speaks

TV TECHNOLOGY

Future shock, Alvin Toffler said years ago, is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

At the NAB Show, the iconic author and futurist will continue his lifelong focus on the collision of technology, culture and economics during the general session, “The Future of Digital Media,” today, 9 a.m. All NAB Show attendees are welcome.

Toffler and his wife and writing partner, Heidi, have written several books widely seen as visionary, explaining the disruptive impact of technological advances, instant information delivery and the global economy.

The groundbreaking “Future Shock” (1970) has sold more than 6 million copies and been a bestseller around the globe, accurately forecasting the “de-massification” of mass media and the coming information revolution.

TAKE CONTROL

Through the years, Toffler has pressed humanity to embrace, not reject change, but to also be its master and not its victim.

“I think we must begin to say no to certain kinds of technology and to begin to control technological change, because we’ve now reached the point at which the technology is so powerful and is so rapid that it could destroy us unless we control it,” Toffler said back in 1972. “But what’s most important is that we simply do not accept everything, that we begin to make critical decisions about what kind of world we want and what kind of technology we want.”

In “The Third Wave,” the Tofflers point to the transition from the second wave (the industrial era) into a world where knowledge — not just labor, property and capital — represents wealth.

Their latest venture, “Revolutionary Wealth,” posits that in the 21st century, wealth cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics. The Tofflers speak of the “third job,” the unnoticed work people who pay for some of the biggest corporations in the world.

“Revolutionary Wealth” explores an earlier Toffler notion, that of the “prosumer,” the consumer who is creating hidden, non-monetized wealth in everything from an online music mashup to community activities.

Another post-modern concept from the Tofflers is that of “obsoledge,” or obsolete knowledge. With knowledge and change coming faster and faster, more and more knowledge becomes obsolete, leaving us with excess stores of “obsoledge.” We’re drowning in obsolete information, Toffler has said. Even worse, corporations and governments make major decisions based on it.

The Tofflers have accumulated some high-profile admirers. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, was an early admirer and became a longtime fan of the Tofflers. (The Tofflers themselves are neither Democratic nor Republican, striving for more transformative politics beyond the two-party system, which they have called an industrial-age relic along with the public education system.)

Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecom mogul identified last year as the world’s richest man (passing Bill Gates), is a huge fan of “Revolutionary Wealth,” according to “The Wall Street Journal.”

TOP EXAMPLE

Time magazine called the Tofflers “the standard by which all subsequent would-be futurists have been measured.”

In China, the People’s Daily called Alvin Toffler one of China’s 50 most influential foreigners. He was one of just 13 Americans to make that cut, along with Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Steven Spielberg and Gates. Toffler visited the country in 1983 to promote “The Third Wave,” which the government banned but then embraced, making it one of the most popular books in the nation’s history.

Toffler has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, a faculty member at the New School for Social Research, and an editor at Fortune magazine.

“In ‘Future Shock,’ the Tofflers warned that many people ‘will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon,’” The New York Times Book Review wrote. “These days, from Baghdad to Bangalore to Boston, it seems more likely that people worry that the future will arrive too late. That’s no small change, and it’s one on which the Tofflers have been shining a light for years.”