Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  At each stage of this development a widely held set of images was attacked by a set of counter-images. Individuals holding one set were assailed by reports, articles, documentaries, and advice from authorities, friends, relatives and even casual acquaintances who accepted conflicting views. The same mother, turning to the same authorities at two different times in the course of raising her child, would receive, in effect, somewhat different advice based on different inferences about reality. While for the people of the past, childrearing patterns remained stable for centuries at a time, for the people of the present and the future, it has, like so many other fields, become an arena in which successive waves of images, many of them generated by scientific research, do battle.

  In this way, new knowledge alters old. The mass media instantly and persuasively disseminate new images, and ordinary individuals, seeking help in coping with an ever more complex social environment, attempt to keep up. At the same time, events – as distinct from research as such – also batter our old image structures. Racing swiftly past our attention screen, they wash out old images and generate new ones. After the freedom rides and the riots in black ghettos only the pathological could hang on to the long-cherished notion that blacks are "happy children" content with their poverty. After the Israeli blitz victory over the Arabs in 1967, how many still cling to the image of the Jew as a cheek-turning pacifist or a battlefield coward?

  In education, in politics, in economic theory, in medicine, in international affairs, wave after wave of new images penetrate our defenses, shake up our mental models of reality. The result of this image bombardment is the accelerated decay of old images, a faster intellectual through-put, and a new, profound sense of the impermanence of knowledge, itself.

  A BLIZZARD of BEST SELLERS

  This impermanence is reflected in society in many subtle ways. A single dramatic example is the impact of the knowledge explosion on that classic knowledge-container, the book.

  As knowledge has become more plentiful and less permanent, we have witnessed the virtual disappearance of the solid old durable leather binding, replaced at first by cloth and later by paper covers. The book itself, like much of the information it holds, has become more transient.

  A decade ago, communications systems designer Sol Cornberg, a radical prophet in the field of library technology, declared that reading would soon cease to be a primary form of information intake. "Reading and writing," he suggested, "will become obsolete skills." (Ironically, Mr. Cornberg's wife is a novelist.)

  Whether or not he is correct, one fact is plain: the incredible expansion of knowledge implies that each book (alas, this one included) contains a progressively smaller fraction of all that is known. And the paperback revolution, by making inexpensive editions available everywhere, lessens the scarcity value of the book at precisely the very moment that the increasingly rapid obsolescence of knowledge lessens its longterm informational value. Thus, in the United States a paperback appears simultaneously on more than 100,000 newsstands, only to be swept away by another tidal wave of publications delivered a mere thirty days later. The book thus approaches the transience of the monthly magazine. Indeed, many books are no more than "one-shot" magazines.

  At the same time, the public's span of interest in a book – even a very popular book – is shrinking. Thus, for example, the life span of best sellers on The New York Times list is rapidly declining. There are marked irregularities from year to year, and some books manage to buck the tide. Nevertheless, if we examine the first four years for which full data on the subject is available, 1953-1956, and compare this with a similar period one decade later, 1963-1966, we find that the average best seller in the earlier period remained on the list a full 18.8 weeks. A decade later this had shrunk to 15.7 weeks. Within a ten-year-period, the life expectancy of the average best seller had shrunk by nearly one-sixth.

  We can understand such trends only if we grasp the elemental underlying truth. We are witnessing an historic process that will inevitably change man's psyche. For across the board, from cosmetics to cosmology, from Twiggy-type trivia to the triumphant facts of technology, our inner images of reality, responding to the acceleration of change outside ourselves, are becoming shorter-lived, more temporary. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things and organizational forms, is becoming disposable.

  THE ENGINEERED MESSAGE

  If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli.

  To understand why, we need first to examine the basic sources of imagery. Where do the thousands of images filed in our mental model come from? The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves – sound waves, light, etc. – strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images.

  These incoming signals are of several types. Some might be called uncoded. Thus, for example, a man walks along a street and notices a leaf whipped along the sidewalk by the wind. He perceives this event through his sensory apparatus. He hears a rustling sound. He sees movement and greenness. He feels the wind. From these sensory perceptions he somehow forms a mental image. We can refer to these sensory signals as a message. But the message was not, in any ordinary sense of the term, man-made. It was not designed by anyone to communicate anything, and the man's understanding of it does not depend directly on a social code – a set of socially agreed-upon signs and definitions. We are all surrounded by and participate in such events. When they occur within range of our senses, we may pick up uncoded messages from them and convert these messages into mental images. In fact, some proportion of the images in every individual's mental model are derived from such uncoded messages.

  But we also receive coded messages from outside ourselves. Coded messages are any which depend upon social convention for their meaning. All languages, whether based on words or gestures, drumbeats or dancesteps, hieroglyphs, pictographs or the arrangement of knots in a string, are codes. All messages conveyed by means of such languages are coded. We may speculate with some safety that as societies have grown larger and more complex, proliferating codes for the transmission of images from person to person, the ratio of uncoded messages received by the ordinary person has declined in favor of coded messages. We may guess, in other words, that today more of our imagery derives from man-made messages than from personal observation of raw, "uncoded" events.

  Furthermore, we can discern a subtle but significant shift in the type of coded messages as well. For the illiterate villager in an agricultural society of the past, most of the incoming messages were what might be called casual or "do-it-yourself" communications. The peasant might engage in ordinary household conversation, banter, cracker-barrel or tavern talk, griping, complaining, boasting, baby talk, (and, in the same sense, animal talk), etc. This determined the nature of most of the coded messages he received, and one characteristic of this sort of communication is its loose, unstructured, garrulous or unedited quality.

  Compare this message input with the kind of coded messages received by the ordinary citizen of the present-day industrial society. In addition to all of the above, he also receives messages – mainly from the mass media – that have been artfully fashioned by communications experts. He listens to the news; he watches carefully scripted plays, telecasts, movies; he hears much more music (a highly disciplined form of communication); he hears frequent speeches. Above all, he does something his peasant ancestor could not do: He reads – thousands of words every day, all of them carefully edited in advance.

  The industrial revolution, bringing with it the enormous elaboration of the mass media, thus alters radically the natur
e of the messages received by the ordinary individual. In addition to receiving uncoded messages from the environment, and coded but casual messages from the people around him, the individual now begins to receive a growing number of coded but pre-engineered messages as well.

  These engineered messages differ from the casual or do-it-yourself product in one crucial respect: Instead of being loose or carelessly framed, the engineered product tends to be tighter, more condensed, less redundant. It is highly purposive, preprocessed to eliminate unnecessary repetition, consciously designed to maximize informational content. It is, as communications theorists say, "information-rich."

  This highly significant but often overlooked fact can be observed by anyone who takes the trouble to compare a tape recorded sample of 500 words of ordinary household conversation (i.e., coded, but casual) with 500 words of newspaper text or movie dialogue (also coded, but engineered). Casual conversation tends to be filled with repetition and pauses. Ideas are repeated several times, often in identical words, but if not, then varied only slightly.

  In contrast, the 500 words of newspaper copy or movie dialogue are carefully preedited, streamlined. They convey relatively non-repetitive ideas. They tend to be more grammatically accurate than ordinary conversation and, if presented orally, they tend to be enunciated more clearly. Waste material has been trimmed away. Editor, writer, director – everyone involved in the production of the engineered message – fights to "keep the story moving" or to produce "fast-paced action." It is no accident that books, movies, television plays, are so frequently advertised as "high-speed adventure," "fast-reading," or "breathless." No publisher or movie producer would dare advertise his work as "repetitive" or "redundant."

  Thus, as radio, television, newspapers, magazines and novels sweep through society, as the proportion of engineered messages received by the individual rises (and the proportion of uncoded and coded casual messages correspondingly declines), we witness a profound change: a steady speed-up in the average pace at which image-producing messages are presented to the individual. The sea of coded information that surrounds him begins to beat at his senses with new urgency.

  This helps account for the sense of hurry in everyday affairs. But if industrialism is marked by a communication's speed-up, the transition to super-industrialism is marked by intense efforts to accelerate the process even further. The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system.

  MOZART ON THE RUN

  In the United States today the median time spent by adults reading newspapers is fifty-two minutes per day. The same person who commits nearly an hour to newspapers also spends time reading magazines, books, signs, billboards, recipes, instructions, labels on cans, advertising on the back of breakfast food boxes, etc. Surrounded by print, he "ingests" between 10,000 and 20,000 edited words per day of the several times that many to which he is exposed. The same person also probably spends an hour and a quarter per day listening to the radio – more if he owns an FM receiver. If he listens to news, commercials, commentary or other such programs, he will, during this period, hear about 11,000 pre-processed words. He also spends several hours watching television – add another 10,000 words or so, plus a sequence of carefully arranged, highly purposive visuals. (This is not to suggest that only words and pictures convey or evoke images. Music, too, sets the internal image machinery working, although the images produced may be completely non-verbal.)

  Nothing, indeed, is quite so purposive as advertising, and today the average American adult is assaulted by a minimum of 560 advertising messages each day. Of the 560 to which he is exposed, however, he only notices seventy-six. In effect, he blocks out 484 advertising messages a day to preserve his attention for other matters.

  All this represents the press of engineered messages against his senses. And the pressure is rising. In an effort to transmit even richer image-producing messages at an even faster rate, communications people, artists and others consciously work to make each instant of exposure to the mass media carry a heavier informational and emotional freight.

  Thus we see the widespread and increasing use of symbolism for compacting information. Today advertising men, in a deliberate attempt to cram more messages into the individual's mind within a given moment of time, make increasing use of the symbolic techniques of the arts. Consider the "tiger" that is allegedly put in one's tank. Here a single word transmits to the audience a distinct visual image that has been associated since childhood with power, speed, and force. The pages of advertising trade magazines like Printer's Ink are filled with sophisticated technical articles about the use of verbal and visual symbolism to accelerate image-flow. Indeed, today many artists might learn new imageaccelerating techniques from the advertising men.

  If the ad men, who must pay for each split second of time on radio or television, and who fight for the reader's fleeting attention in magazines and newspapers, are busy trying to communicate maximum imagery in minimum time, there is evidence, too, that at least some members of the public want to increase the rate at which they can receive messages and process images. This explains the phenomenal success of speed-reading courses among college students, business executives, politicians and others. One leading speed-reading school claims it can increase almost anyone's input speed three times, and some readers report the ability to read literally tens of thousands of words per minute – a claim roundly disputed by many reading experts. Whether or not such speeds are possible, the clear fact is that the rate of communication is accelerating. Busy people wage a desperate battle each day to plow through as much information as possible. Speed-reading presumably helps them do this.

  The impulse toward acceleration in communications is, however, by no means limited to advertising or to the printed word. A desire to maximize message content in minimum time explains, for example, the experiments conducted by psychologists at the American Institutes for Research who played taped lectures at faster than normal speeds and then tested the comprehension of listeners. Their purpose: to discover whether students would learn more if lecturers talked faster.

  The same intent to accelerate information flow explains the recent obsession with splitscreen and multiscreen movies. At the Montreal World's Fair, viewers in pavilion after pavilion were confronted not with a traditional movie screen on which ordered visual images appear in sequence, but with two, three, or five screens, each of them hurling messages at the viewer at the same time. On these, several stories play themselves out at the same time, demanding of the viewer the ability to accept many more messages simultaneously than any movie-goer in the past, or else to censor out, or block, certain messages to keep the rate of message-input, or image-stimulation, within reasonable limits.

  The author of an article in Life, entitled "A Film Revolution to Blitz Man's Mind," accurately describes the experience in these words: "Having to look at six images at the same time, having to watch in twenty minutes the equivalent of a full length movie, excites and crams the mind." Elsewhere he suggests that another multi-screen film "by putting more into a moment, condenses time."

  Even in music the same accelerative thrust is increasingly evident. A conference of composers and computer specialists held in San Francisco not long ago was informed that for several centuries music has been undergoing "an increase in the amount of auditory information transmitted during a given interval of time," and there is evidence also that musicians today play the music of Mozart, Bach and Haydn at a faster tempo than that at which the same music was performed at the time it was composed. We are getting Mozart on the run.

  THE SEMI-LITERATE SHAKESPEARE

  If our images of reality are changing more rapidly, and the machinery of image-transmission is being speeded up, a parallel change is altering the very codes we use. For language, too, is convulsing. According to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, senior editor of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, "The
words we use are changing faster today – and not merely on the slang level, but on every level. The rapidity with which words come and go is vastly accelerated. This seems to be true not only of English, but of French, Russian and Japanese as well."

  Flexner illustrated this with the arresting suggestion that, of the estimated 450,000 "usable" words in the English language today, only perhaps 250,000 would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare. Were Shakespeare suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on the average, only five out of every nine words in our vocabulary. The Bard would be a semi-literate.

  This implies that if the language had the same number of words in Shakespeare's time as it does today, at least 200,000 words – perhaps several times that many – have dropped out and been replaced in the intervening four centuries. Moreover, Flexner conjectures that a full third of this turnover has occurred within the last fifty years alone. This, if correct, would mean that words are now dropping out of the language and being replaced at a rate at least three times faster than during the base period 1564 to 1914.

  This high turnover rate reflects changes in things, processes, and qualities in the environment. Some new words come directly from the world of consumer products and technology. Thus, for example, words like "fast-back," "wash-and-wear" or flashcube" were all propelled into the language by advertising in recent years. Other words come from the headlines. "Sit-in" and "swim-in" are recent products of the civil rights movement; "teach-in" a product of the campaign against the Vietnam war; "be-in" and "love-in" products of the hippie subculture. The LSD cult has brought with it a profusion of new words – "acid-head," "psychedelic," etc.