Posted on 06/29/2016 10:45:30 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Alvin Toffler, the far-seeing futurist who predicted humanity's rising anxiety with digital and technological progress in his hugely influential 1970 book "Future Shock," has died at the age of 87, his consulting company confirmed Wednesday.
Toffler — who is also credited with having coined the term "information overload" to describe people's struggle to keep up with exponentially expanding data — died Monday night at his home in Los Angeles, Toffler Associates said in a statement it released at the request of Toffler's widow, Heidi Toffler. No cause of death was given.
Alvin Toffler during a talk at the Astrobiology Roadmap Workshop in Mountain View, California, in July 1998. Paul Sakuma / AP "Future Shock" sold millions of copies at a time when society was in churn, amid riots over the Vietnam War, the maturation of the civil rights movement and the growth of centralized mass media. Toffler defined the phenomenon as "too much change in too short a period of time."
The book was the fruit of five years of work that began in 1965 with the publication of a magazine article titled "The Future as a Way of Life." It posited that human society was in transition to a globalized "post-industrial" age in which the majority of human activity was devoted to services, scholarship and creativity, as opposed to agrarian and manual labor.
Soon, he wrote, the post-industrial economy would give way to a knowledge-based "new economy," characterized by the ever-accelerating pace of daily life, the pulling apart of the traditional family, rapid changes in business and politics and the ascendance of technology in daily affairs.
Many commentators and scholars contend that all of those predictions — which were expanded upon in two influential followup best-sellers, "The Third Wave" (1980) and "Powershift" (1990) — have already come true.
Toffler, a former newspaper reporter and editor, had a gift for boiling down his complicated theories into easy-to-swallow nostrums, which immensely helped spread his philosophies. Among his pithy observations were these:
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. " "If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy."
"Change is not merely necessary to life — it is life."
"It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources."
And perhaps most famous: "The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order."
In a 2002 interview with ComputerWorld magazine, Toffler surveyed the landscape and declared:
"There is no one driving force that is always the driving force. What's happening today is not just an incremental, straight-line extrapolation of what's happened until now. This is something new, transformatory. If this is really an IT revolution, then the one thing you don't expect is linear change. You expect ups and downs, surprises, zigzags, inversions. A revolution is an upheaval."
modern life not touched by his work," Deborah Westphal, chief executive of Toffler Associates, said Wednesday. "We are ever mindful of his influence as we navigate a world marked by widening artificial intelligence, globally connected societies and a quickening pace of change."
A private burial will be held in Los Angeles, the company said.
Epitaph:
Almost Constantly Wrong.
Nearly All the Time.
Made Money, Though.
He was popular in the 70s
He and the mega trends guy
That book was everywhere when it first came out. I had to read it for a Contemporary Literature class. I had a choice between “Future Shock” and Fahrenheit 451. I tried starting Fahrenheit, but found it enormously dull and plodding.
I had no reference for it. The teacher didn’t really help us link it to real life circumstances either. I was never that big on Science Fiction anyway. I didn’t care for Watership Down, the book about Warrior Rabbit tribes. Another book heavily praised in those days was The Hobbit. Not for me though. Boring! I liked biographies and historic novels best.
I read his books ( the first one was interesting...the second two were TERRIBLE, stupid,and patently ridiculous dog poo ) long before Newtie began pushing them. Once Newt did that, it was the final nail in his coffin, as far as I was concerned.
Did you read all three books in that series ?
Suitable only for impressing high school kids and college freshmen who don't know any better.
Well, things have certainly changed since 1965.
Whether they’ve changed in ways anticipated by Toffler could be argued.
They have not, however, changed in ways that are positive, and that is inarguable.
I read the book when it came out. I didn’t buy its premise because my grandparents who were born in the 1890s and grew up in Sweden without electricity or indoor plumbing, managed to easily adapt to radio, tv, air travel, etc. Those born in the 1880s and 1890s experienced huge changes and took them all in stride.
The first was quite enough.
Dear old ALVIN was a NUTCASE!
Too bad he didn’t make it to the singularity.
Things have changed, but NOT as he predicted it would...such as paper clothing that everyone would wear once and then just throw away.
You are 100% correct !
Gongrich was into Toffler long before that.
I found an old copy of Future shock a few years ago and read it expecting it to have been wrong, like most of the prediction books.
But it was not. It was pretty darn accurate.
Well, when it came to Alvin, Newtie’s stupid and far too susceptible to snake oil!
Toffler wasn’t a fool - he was evil. His whole life was a psyop dedicated to teaching people to accept the contrived destruction of Western culture as natural and inevitable. Good riddance to the bastard.
“He and the mega trends guy”
Marshall McLuhan?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.