Word: toffler
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This may sound visionary, but it's nothing compared with the vision sketched by Gingrich's favorite futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in their book Creating a New Civilization. The Tofflers view the old-fashioned, physical Congress as suffering from a progressive erosion of relevance that calls for a wholesale rethinking of the Constitution. "Today's spectacular advances in communications technology open, for the first time, a mind-boggling array of possibilities for direct citizen participation in political decision-making." And since our "pseudo-representatives" are so "unresponsive," we the people must begin to "shift from depending on representatives...
...world learns every day terrible new meanings of the word Balkanization. And while some places are wired for international transmission, others (think of Iran or North Korea or Burma) remain as isolated as ever, widening the gap between the haves and the have- nots, or what Alvin Toffler has called the "fast" and the "slow" worlds. Tokyo has more telephones than the whole continent of Africa...
...even 500 points of light will not necessarily mean a sudden bounty of new home entertainment. "There isn't an inexhaustible supply of talent out there waiting to fill 500 channels," warns Howard Stringer, CBS Broadcast Group president. "The first thing that comes to mind is what Alvin Toffler called the Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets...
...this century, an entire futurology industry has arisen to satisfy the planning needs of corporations, governments and military establishments. At the same time, the popular audience for social trends and future talk has grown steadily. Toffler (Powershift), John Naisbitt (Megatrends 2000) and Faith Popcorn (The Popcorn Report) have all made visits to the best-seller list in the past two years...
Futurologists in recent decades predicted the rise of couch potatoes nesting at home (Popcorn), the arrival of the home office and the multiple-marriage lifetime (Toffler). But by and large they missed out on many developments of much greater consequence, like the rise of OPEC and the mass arrival of women in the workplace...