Word: toffler
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...days, you might sigh, when an hour was 45 minutes and sometimes 90, and when people ate with spoons, and butter-knives were but a dream in Shreve, Crump of Low's darkest recesses. But if Alvin Toffler heard you he would scold, consigning you to the First Wave, which began with the original harvest. For Toffler is a visionary, looking out to sea at that big comber waiting to smash the sandcastles of today--this Third Wave, the biggest, most powerful, most blessed of all. "The Third Wave," he notes in the introduction, "is for those who think...
Unfortunately for the reader, Toffler's story too has only just begun. For 450 pages more, he plays Daniel Bell and Jeanne Dixon, but with heart. Every page shows the strain of his midwifery; to give birth to a new era is hard work indeed. The wonder is that anyone agreed to publish this diary of Toffler's nighttime fears and Newsweek clippings. But there is an explanation. A decade ago, Alvin Toffler wrote a book with a clever computer-letters cover called Future Shock. And even if that effort was not immediately heralded as better than Revelation and installed...
...nearly as many interesting laser-household-pets, deep-sea-wheat-fields, radio-shack-rocket-to-the-moon-kit predictions. Instead it offers a thorough compendium of every social critique ever raised. Ever hear anyone discuss the demeaning, unfulfilling work done in the world's factories? Sure you have. Well, Toffler has too, and he repeats it in ingratiating detail, describing the steel foundry he once toiled in. "I swallowed the dust, the sweat and smoke of the foundry. My ears were split by the hiss of the steam, the clank of the chains, the roar of pug mills." Leaving...
Arguing that "to understand today's colliding waves of change we must be able to identify clearly the parallel structures of all industrial nations," Toffler fills the first 140 pages of his book with an explanation of the Second Wave, born of the Industrial Revolution. The subtitles that break up the copy every page or so yield the basic scheme, not to mention mentality, of Toffler's discussion. "The Technicians of Power." "Mechano-Mania." "The Streamlined Family." "The Paper Blizzard." "The Progress Principle." Under industrialism, he argues, life is as nasty, brutish and short as it ever...
Take the corporation, for instance. Stung by the realization that they have raped the earth and exploited its people, corporate managers even today are in an "identity crisis," Toffler reports. From it will emerge humane, "multi-purpose," productive enterprises, as concerned with helping the poor and aiding the environment as with turning profits. Toffler points to the "distinct upgrading of the status and influence of executives concerned with the environmental consequences of corporate behavior. "Some now report directly to the president. Other companies have set up special committees on the board of directors." Some observers, still mired in Second Wave...