Word: toffler
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...THIRD WAVE by Alvin Toffler Morrow; 544 pages...
...future flies. Ten years have already passed since Alvin Toffler published his bestselling Future Shock and emerged as the world's best-known manipulator of the fast-forward. Traveling the globe, lecturing businessmen and collecting the fuzz that grows on the inside of think tanks, Toffler became an orbiting Walter Winchell. Bulletins from the leading edge beamed down on Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. The effect could be stimulating but, too often, Toffler's redundant delivery and overheated prose turned kernels of truth into puffed generalities...
...same formula should ensure a wide, expectant audience for The Third Wave. Readers who can sort out the scattered facts and insights from such amalgams as "indust-reality" and "indi-video" will learn a few things. Discrimination may not be necessary, for as Toffler McLuhanizes, "Third Wave people . . . are more at ease in the midst of this bombardment of blips . . . But they also keep an eye out for those new concepts or metaphors that sum up or organize blips into larger wholes...
...practitioners of a parascience, the authors are rightly humble about confusing their models with immutable truths. They may not have the lively journalistic bounce of an Alvin Toffler or the fluid drive of a Vance Packard, but Social Standing's scholarship adds some fascinating discriminations. For example, though money is the basic yardstick people use to rank themselves, income is only a component of status, not its cause. Education is the prime means to higher income - which is then translated into higher status. But schooling that does not lead to a high-paying job earns few points...
...Alvin Toffler...