Word: toffler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Future Shock, Toffler...
...stirred such excitement in the entertainment and communications industry, or aroused such anxiety among the potential victims of change. Enthusiasts insist that video cartridges in time will radically alter the status quo in television, motion pictures, theater, music, journalism, book publishing and many other fields. Some futurists, notably Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock (TIME, Aug. 3), argue that TV cassettes will quicken the already bewildering pace of change in American life, carrying the U.S. farther away from standardization in the arts, education and cultural tastes. Many young TV makers feel that the new equipment will lead...
Yeatsian Gloom. Today, Toffler contends, we are all renters, all nomads. "We have not merely extended the scope and scale of change, we have radically altered its pace," he says. "We have in our time released a totally new social force-a stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we 'feel' the world around...
...What Toffler calls "a fire storm of change" leaves in its wake "all sorts of curious social flora-from psychedelic churches and 'free universities' to science cities in the Arctic and wife-swap clubs in California." With Yeatsian gloom, he adds: "It breeds odd personalities, too: children who at twelve are no longer childlike; adults who at 50 are children of twelve. There are anarchists who, beneath their dirty denim shirts, are outrageous conformists, and conformists who, beneath their button-down collars, are outrageous anarchists. There are married priests and atheist ministers and Jewish Zen Buddhists. We have...
...hocracies. All this arises because men can no longer absorb all that is relentlessly new, and traditional institutions seem unable to encompass and interpret headlong technological change and its social consequences. Writes Toffler: "It is not simply that we do not know which goals to pursue. The trouble lies deeper. For accelerating change has made obsolete the methods by which we arrive at social goals. The technocrats do not yet understand this, and, reacting to the goals crisis in knee-jerk fashion, they reach for the tried and true methods of the past...