Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  In a modular relationship, the demands are strictly bounded. So long as the shoe salesman performs his rather limited service for us, thereby fulfilling our rather limited expectations, we do not insist that he believe in our God, or that he be tidy at home, or share our political values, or enjoy the same kind of food or music that we do. We leave him free in all other matters – as he leaves us free to be atheist or Jew, heterosexual or homosexual, John Bircher or Communist. This is not true of the total relationship and cannot be. To a certain point, fragmentation and freedom go together.

  All of us seem to need some totalistic relationships in our lives. But to decry the fact that we cannot have only such relationships is nonsense. And to prefer a society in which the individual has holistic relationships with a few, rather than modular retionships with many, is to wish for a return to the imprisonment of the past – a past when individuals may have been more tightly bound to one another, but when they were also more tightly regimented by social conventions, sexual mores, political and religious restrictions.

  This is not to say that modular relationships entail no risks or that this is the best of all possible worlds. There are, in fact, profound risks in the situation, as we shall attempt to show. Until now, however, the entire public and professional discussion of these issues has been badly out of focus. For it has overlooked a critical dimension of all interpersonal relationships: their duration.

  THE DURATION OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

  Sociologists like Wirth have referred in passing to the transitory nature of human ties in urban society. But they have made no systematic effort to relate the shorter duration of human ties to shorter durations in other kinds of relationships. Nor have they attempted to document the progressive decline in these durations. Until we analyze the temporal character of human bonds, we will completely misunderstand the move toward super-industrialism.

  For one thing, the decline in the average duration of human relationships is a likely corollary of the increase in the number of such relationships. The average urban individual today probably comes into contact with more people in a week than the feudal villager did in a year, perhaps even a lifetime. The villager's ties with other people no doubt included some transient relationships, but most of the people he knew were the same throughout his life. The urban man may have a core group of people with whom his interactions are sustained over long periods of time, but he also interacts with hundreds, perhaps thousands of people whom he may see only once or twice and who then vanish into anonymity.

  All of us approach human relationships, as we approach other kinds of relationships, with a set of built-in durational expectancies. We expect that certain kinds of relationships will endure longer than others. It is, in fact, possible to classify relationships with other people in terms of their expected duration. These vary, of course, from culture to culture and from person to person. Nevertheless, throughout wide sectors of the population of the advanced technological societies something like the following order is typical:

  Long-duration relationships. We expect ties with our immediate family, and to a lesser extent with other kin, to extend throughout the lifetimes of the people involved. This expectation is by no means always fulfilled, as rising divorce rates and family break-ups indicate. Nevertheless, we still theoretically marry "until death do us part" and the social ideal is a lifetime relationship. Whether this is a proper or realistic expectation in a society of high transience is debatable. The fact remains, however, that family links are expected to be long term, if not lifelong, and considerable guilt attaches to the person who breaks off such a relationship.

  Medium-duration relationships. Four classes of relationships fall within this category. Roughly in order of descending durational expectancies, these are relationships with friends, neighbors, job associates, and co-members of churches, clubs and other voluntary organizations.

  Friendships are traditionally supposed to survive almost, if not quite, as long as family ties. The culture places high value on "old friends" and a certain amount of blame attaches to dropping a friendship. One type of friendship relationship, however, acquaintanceship, is recognized as less durable.

  Neighbor relationships are no longer regarded as long-term commitments – the rate of geographical turnover is too high. They are expected to last as long as the individual remains in a single location, an interval that is growing shorter and shorter on average. Breaking off with a neighbor may involve other difficulties, but it carries no great burden of guilt.

  On-the-job relationships frequently overlap friendships, and less often, neighbor relationships. Traditionally, particularly among white-collar, professional and technical people, job relationships were supposed to last a relatively long time. This expectation, however, is also changing rapidly, as we shall see.

  Co-membership relationships – links with people in church or civic organizations, political parties and the like – sometimes flower into friendship, but until that happens such individual associations are regarded as more perishable than either friendships, ties with neighbors or fellow workers.

  Short-duration relationships. Most, though not all, service relationships fall into this category. These involve sales clerks, delivery people, gas station attendants, milkmen, barbers, hairdressers, etc. The turnover among these is relatively rapid and little or no shame attaches to the person who terminates such a relationship. Exceptions to the service patterns are professionals such as physicians, lawyers and accountants, with whom relationships are expected to be somewhat more enduring.

  This categorization is hardly airtight. Most of us can cite some "service" relationship that has lasted longer than some friendship, job or neighbor relationship. Moreover, most of us can cite a number of quite long-lasting relationships in our own lives – perhaps we have been going to the same doctor for years or have maintained extremely close ties with a college friend. Such cases are hardly unusual, but they are relatively few in number in our lives. They are like long-stemmed flowers towering above a field of grass in which each blade represents a short-term relationship, a transient contact. It is the very durability of these ties that makes them noticeable. Such exceptions do not invalidate the rule. They do not change the key fact that, across the board, the average interpersonal relationship in our life is shorter and shorter in duration.

  THE HURRY-UP WELCOME

  Continuing urbanization is merely one of a number of pressures driving us toward greater "temporariness" in our human relationships. Urbanization, as suggested earlier, brings great masses of people into close proximity, thereby increasing the actual number of contacts made. This process is, however, strongly reinforced by the rising geographical mobility described in the last chapter. Geographical mobility not only speeds up the flow of places through our lives, but the flow of people as well.

  The increase in travel brings with it a sharp increase in the number of transient, casual relationships with fellow passengers, with hotel clerks, taxi drivers, airline reservation people, with porters, maids, waiters, with colleagues and friends of friends, with customs officials, travel agents and countless others. The greater the mobility of the individual, the greater the number of brief, face-to-face encounters, human contacts, each one a relationship of sorts, fragmentary and, above all, compressed in time. (Such contacts appear natural and unimportant to us. We seldom stop to consider how few of the sixty-six billion human beings who preceded us on the planet ever experienced this high rate of transience in their human relationships.)

  If travel increases the number of contacts – largely with service people of one sort or another – residential relocation also steps up the through-put of people in our lives. Moving leads to the termination of relationships in almost all categories. The young submarine engineer who is transferred from his job in the Navy Yard at Mare Island, California, to the installation at Newport News, Virginia, takes only his most immediate family with him. He leaves behind parents and in-laws, neighbors, service and tradespeop
le, as well as his associates on the job, and others. He cuts short his ties. In settling down in the new community, he, his wife and child must initiate a whole cluster of new (and once more temporary) relationships.

  Here is how one young wife, a veteran of eleven moves in the past seventeen years, describes the process: "When you live in a neighborhood you watch a series of changes take place. One day a new mailman delivers the mail. A few weeks later the girl at the check-out counter at the supermarket disappears and a new one takes her place. Next thing you know, the mechanic at the gas station is replaced. Meanwhile, a neighbor moves out next door and a new family moves in. These changes are taking place all the time, but they are gradual. When you move, you break all these ties at once, and you have to start all over again. You have to find a new pediatrician, a new dentist, a new car mechanic who won't cheat you, and you quit all your organizations and start over again." It is the simultaneous rupture of a whole range of existing relationships that makes relocation psychologically taxing for many.

  The more frequently this cycle repeats itself, of course, in the life of the individual, the shorter the duration of the relationships involved. Among significant sectors of the population this process is now occurring so rapidly that it is drastically altering traditional notions of time with respect to human relationships. "At a cocktail party on Frogtown Road the other night," reads a story in The New York Times, "the talk got around to how long those at the party had lived in New Canaan. To nobody's surprise, it developed that the couple of longest residence had been there five years." In slower moving times and places, five years constituted little more than a breaking-in period for a family moved to a new community. It took that long to be "accepted." Today the breaking-in-period must be highly compressed in time.

  Thus we have in many American suburbs a commercial "Welcome Wagon" service that accelerates the process by introducing newcomers to the chief stores and agencies in the community. A paid Welcome Wagon employee – usually a middle-aged lady – visits the newcomers, answers questions about the community, and leaves behind brochures and, sometimes, inexpensive gift certificates redeemable at local stores. Since it affects only relationships in the service category and is, actually, little more than a form of advertising, the Welcome Wagon's integrative impact is superficial.

  The process of linking up with new neighbors and friends is, however, often quite effectively accelerated by the presence of certain people – usually divorced or single older women – who play the role of informal "integrator" in the community. Such people are found in many established suburbs and housing developments. Their function has been described by urban sociologist Robert Gutman of Rutgers University, who notes that while the integrator herself is frequently isolated from the mainstream of social life in the community, she derives pleasure from serving as a "bridge" for newcomers. She takes the initiative by inviting them to parties and other gatherings. The newcomers are duly flattered that an "oldtime" resident – in many communities "oldtime" means two years – is willing to invite them. The newcomers, alas, quickly learn that the integrator is herself an "outsider" whereupon, more often than not, they promptly disassociate themselves from her.

  "Fortunately for the integrator," Gutman says, "by the time he or she managed to introduce the newcomer to the community and the newcomer in turn had gone on to abandon the integrator, there were new arrivals in the settlement to whom the integrator could once again proffer the hand of friendship."

  Other people in the community also help speed the process of relationship formation. Thus, in developments, Gutman says, "Respondents reported that the real estate agents introduced them to neighbors before they had taken possession. In some cases, wives were called on by other wives in the neighborhood, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups. Neighboring wives, or husbands, encountered each other casually, while out gardening and cleaning up the yard or in tending children. And, of course, there were the usual meetings brought about by the children, who themselves often were the first to establish contact with the human population of the new environment."

  Local organizations also play an important part in helping the individual integrate quickly into the community. This is more likely to be true among suburban homeowners than among housing development residents. Churches, political parties and women's organizations provide many of the human relationships that the newcomers seek. According to Gutman, "Sometimes a neighbor would inform the newcomer about the existence of the voluntary association, and might even take the newcomer to his first meeting; but even in these cases it was up to the migrant himself to find his own primary group within the association."

  The knowledge that no move is final, that somewhere along the road the nomads will once more gather up their belongings and migrate, works against the development of relationships that are more than modular, and it means that if relationships are to be struck up at all, they had better be whipped into life quickly.

  If, however, the breaking-in period is compressed in time, the leave-taking – the breaking-out – is also telescoped. This is particularly true of service relationships which, being unidimensional, can be both initiated and terminated with dispatch. "They come and they go," says the manager of a suburban food store. "You miss them one day and then you learn they've moved to Dallas." "Washington, D. C., retailers seldom have a chance to build long, enduring relationships with customers," observes a writer in Business Week. "Different faces all the time," says a conductor on the New Haven commuter line.

  Even babies soon become aware of the transience of human ties. The "nanny" of the past has given way to the baby-sitter service which sends out a different person each time to mind the children. And the same trend toward time-truncated relationships is reflected in the demise of the family doctor. The late lamented family doctor, the general practitioner, did not have the refined narrow expertise of the specialist, but he did, at least, have the advantage of being able to observe the same patient almost from cradle to coffin. Today the patient doesn't stay put. Instead of enjoying a long-term relationship with a single physician, he flits back and forth between a variety of specialists, changing these relationships each time he relocates to a new community. Even within any single relationship, the contacts become shorter and shorter as well. Thus the authors of Crestwood Heights, discussing the interaction of experts and laymen, refer to "the short duration of any one exposure to each other ... The nature of their contact, which is in turn a function of busy, time-pressed lives on both sides, means that any message must be collapsed into a very brief communique, and that there must not be too many of these ..." The impact that this fragmentation and contraction of patient-doctor relationships has on health care ought to be more seriously explored.

  FRIENDSHIPS IN THE FUTURE

  Each time the family moves, it also tends to slough off a certain number of just plain friends and acquaintances. Left behind, they are eventually all but forgotten. Separation does not end all relationships. We maintain contact with, perhaps, one or two friends from the old location, and we tend to keep in sporadic touch with relatives. But with each move there is a deadly attrition. At first there is an eager flurry of letters back and forth. There may be occasional visits or telephone calls. But gradually these decrease in frequency. Finally, they stop coming. Says a typical English suburbanite after leaving London: "You can't forget it [London]. Not with all your family living there and that. We still got friends living in Plumstead and Eltham. We used to go back every weekend. But you can't keep that up."

  John Barth has captured the sense of turnover among friendships in a passage from his novel The Floating Opera: "Our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we must either renew our friendship – catch up to date – or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more." The only fault in this is its unspoken suggestion that the current upon which friendships bob and float is lazy
and meandering. The current today is picking up speed. Friendship increasingly resembles a canoe shooting the rapids of the river of change. "Pretty soon," says Professor Eli Ginzberg of Columbia University, an expert on manpower mobility, "we're all going to be metropolitan-type people in this country without ties or commitments to long time friends and neighbors." In a brilliant paper on "Friendships in the Future," psychologist Courtney Tall suggests that "Stability based on close relationships with a few people will be ineffective, due to the high mobility, wide interest range, and varying capacity for adaptation and change found among the members of a highly automated society ... Individuals will develop the ability to form close 'buddy-type' relationships on the basis of common interests or sub-group affiliations, and to easily leave these friendships, moving either to another location and joining a similar interest group or to another interest group within the same location ... Interests will change rapidly ...

  "This ability to form and then to drop, or lower to the level of acquaintanceship, close relationships quickly, coupled with increased mobility, will result in any given individual forming many more friendships than is possible for most in the present ... Friendship patterns of the majority in the future will provide for many satisfactions, while substituting many close relationships of shorter durability for the few long-term friendships formed in the past."

  MONDAY-TO-FRIDAY FRIENDS

  One reason to believe that the trend toward temporary relationships will continue is the impact of new technology on occupations. Even if the push toward megalopolis stopped and people froze in their geographical tracks, there would still be a sharp increase in the number, and decrease in the duration of relationships as a consequence of job changes. For the introduction of advanced technology, whether we call it automation or not, is necessarily accompanied by drastic changes in the types of skills and personalities required by the economy.