Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  Does any of this matter? Some people argue that diversity in the material environment is insignificant so long as we are racing toward cultural or spiritual homogeneity. "It's what's inside that counts," they say, paraphrasing a well-known cigarette commercial.

  This view gravely underestimates the importance of material goods as symbolic expressions of human personality differences, and it foolishly denies a connection between the inner and outer environment. Those who fear the standardization of human beings should warmly welcome the destandardization of goods. For by increasing the diversity of goods available to man we increase the mathematical probability of differences in the way men actually live.

  More important, however, is the very premise that we are racing toward cultural homogeneity, since a close look at this also suggests that just the opposite is true. It is unpopular to say this, but we are moving swiftly toward fragmentation and diversity not only in material production, but in art, education and mass culture as well.

  One highly revealing test of cultural diversity in any literate society has to do with the number of different books published per million of population. The more standardized the tastes of the public, the fewer titles will be published per million; the more diverse these tastes, the greater the number of titles. The increase or decrease of this figure over time is a significant clue to the direction of cultural change in the society. This was the reasoning behind a study of world book trends published by UNESCO. Conducted by Robert Escarpit director of the Center for the Sociology of Literature at the University of Bordeaux, it provided dramatic evidence of a powerful international shift toward cultural destandardization.

  Thus, between 1952 and 1962 the index of diversity rose in fully twenty-one of the twenty-nine chief book-producing nations. Among the countries registering the highest shifts toward literary diversity were Canada, the United States and Sweden, all with increases in excess of 50 percent or more. The United Kingdom, France, Japan and the Netherlands all moved from 10 to 25 percent in the same direction. The eight countries that moved in the opposite direction – i.e., toward greater standardization of literary outputwere India, Mexico, Argentina, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and Austria. In short, the more advanced the technology in a country, the greater the likelihood that it would be moving in the direction of literary diversity and away from uniformity.

  The same push toward pluralism is evident in painting, too, where we find an almost incredibly wide spectrum of production. Representationalism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, hard-edge, pop, kinetic, and a hundred other styles are pumped into the society at the same time. One or another may dominate the galleries temporarily, but there are no universal standards or styles. It is a pluralistic marketplace.

  When art was a tribal-religious activity, the painter worked for the whole community. Later he worked for a single small aristocratic elite. Still later the audience appeared as a single undifferentiated mass. Today he faces a large audience split into a milling mass of subgroups. According to John McHale: "The most uniform cultural contexts are typically primitive enclaves. The most striking feature of our contemporary 'mass' culture is the vast range and diversity of its alternative cultural choices ... The 'mass,' on even cursory examination, breaks down into many different 'audiences."'

  Indeed, artists no longer attempt to work for a universal public. Even when they think they are doing so, they are usually responding to the tastes and styles preferred by one or another sub-group in the society. Like the manufacturers of pancake syrup and automobiles, artists, too, produce for "mini-markets." And as these markets multiply, artistic output diversifies.

  The push for diversity, meanwhile, is igniting bitter conflict in education. Ever since the rise of industrialism, education in the West, and particularly in the United States, has been organized for the mass production of basically standardized educational packages. It is not accidental that at the precise moment when the consumer has begun to demand and obtain greater diversity, the same moment when new technology promises to make destandardization possible, a wave of revolt has begun to sweep the college campus. Though the connection is seldom noticed, events on the campus and events in the consumer market are intimately connected.

  One basic complaint of the student is that he is not treated as an individual, that he is served up an undifferentiated gruel, rather than a personalized product. Like the Mustang buyer, the student wants to design his own. The difference is that while industry is highly responsive to consumer demand, education typically has been indifferent to student wants. (In one case we say, "the customer knows best"; in the other, we insist that "Papa – or his educational surrogate – knows best.") Thus the student-consumer is forced to fight to make the education industry responsive to his demand for diversity.

  While most colleges and universities have greatly broadened the variety of their course offerings, they are still wedded to complex standardizing systems based on degrees, majors and the like. These systems lay down basic tracks along which all students must progress. While educators are rapidly multiplying the number of alternative paths, the pace of diversification is by no means swift enough for the students. This explains why young people have set up "para-universities" – experimental colleges and so-called free universities – in which each student is free to choose what he wishes from a mind-shattering smorgasbord of courses that range from guerrilla tactics and stock market techniques to Zen Buddhism and "underground theater."

  Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track. For the students now pressuring higher education to destandardize, to move toward superindustrial diversity, will win their battle.

  It is significant, for example, that one of the chief results of the student strike in France was a massive decentralization of the university system. Decentralization makes possible greater regional diversity, local authority to alter curriculum, student regulations and administrative practices.

  A parallel revolution is brewing in the public schools as well. It has already flared into open violence. Like the disturbance at Berkeley that initiated the worldwide wave of student protest, it has begun with something that appears at first glimpse to be a purely local issue.

  Thus New York City, whose public education system encompasses nearly 900 schools and is responsible for one out of every forty American public school pupils, has suffered the worst teachers' strike in history – precisely over the issue of decentralization. Teacher picket lines, parent boycotts, and near riot have become everyday occurrences in the city's schools. Angered by the ineffectiveness of the schools, and by what they rightfully regard as blatant race prejudice, black parents, backed by various community forces, have demanded that the entire school system be cut up into smaller "community-run" school systems.

  In effect, New York's black population, having failed to achieve racial integration and quality education, wants its own school system. It wants courses in Negro history. It wants greater parental involvement with the schools than is possible in the present large, bureaucratic and ossified system. It claims, in short, the right to be different.

  The essential issues far transcend racial prejudice, however. Until now the big urban school systems in the United States have been powerful homogenizing influences. By fixing city-wide standards and curricula, by choosing texts and personnel on a city-wide basis, they have imposed considerable uniformity on the schools.

  Today, the pressure for decentralization, which has already spread to Detroit, Washington, Milwaukee, and other major cities in the United States (and which will, in different forms, spread to Europe as well), is an attempt not simply to improve the education of Negroes, but to smash the very idea of centralized, city-wide school policies. It is an attempt to generate local variety in public education by turning over control of the schools to local authorities. It is, in short, part of a larger struggle to d
iversify education in the last third of the twentieth century. That the effort has been temporarily blocked in New York, largely through the stubborn resistance of an entrenched trade union, does not mean that the historic forces pushing toward destandardization will forever be contained.

  Failure to diversify education within the system will simply lead to the growth of alternative educational opportunities outside the system. Thus we have today the suggestions of prominent educators and sociologists, including Kenneth B. Clark and Christopher Jencks, for the creation of new schools outside of, and competitive with, the official public school systems. Clark has called for regional and state schools, federal schools, schools run by colleges, trade unions, corporations and even military units. Such competing schools would, he contends, help create the diversity that education desperately needs. Simultaneously, in a less formal way, a variety of "para-schools" are already being established by hippie communes and other groups who find the mainstream educational system too homogeneous.

  We see here, therefore, a major cultural force in the society – education – being pushed to diversify its output, exactly as the economy is doing. And here, exactly as in the realm of material production, the new technology, rather than fostering standardization, carries us toward super-industrial diversity.

  Computers, for example, make it easier for a large school to schedule more flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study, with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular activities. More important, computerassisted education, programmed instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. They permit each student to advance at his own purely personal pace. They permit him to follow a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the traditional industrial era classroom.

  Moreover, in the educational world of tomorrow, that relic of mass production, the centralized work place, will also become less important. Just as economic mass production required large numbers of workers to be assembled in factories, educational mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in schools. This itself, with its demands for uniform discipline, regular hours, attendance checks and the like, was a standardizing force. Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A good deal of education will take place in the student's own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of his own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to him via computerized information retrieval systems, with his own tapes and video units, his own language laboratory and his own electronically equipped study carrel, he will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged him in the lockstep classroom.

  The technology upon which these new freedoms will be based will inevitably spread through the schools in the years ahead – aggressively pushed, no doubt, by major corporations like IBM, RCA, and Xerox. Within thirty years, the educational systems of the United States, and several Western European countries as well, will have broken decisively with the mass production pedagogy of the past, and will have advanced into an era of educational diversity based on the liberating power of the new machines.

  In education, therefore, as in the production of material goods, the society is shifting irresistibly away from, rather than toward, standardization. It is not simply a matter of more varied automobiles, detergents and cigarettes. The social thrust toward diversity and increased individual choice affects our mental, as well as our material surroundings.

  "DRAG QUEEN" MOVIES

  Of all the forces accused of homogenizing the modern mind, few have been so continuously and bitterly criticized as the mass media. Intellectuals in the United States and Europe have lambasted television, in particular, for standardizing speech, habits, and tastes. They have pictured it as a vast lawnroller flattening out our regional differences, crushing the last vestiges of cultural variety. A thriving academic industry has leveled similar charges against magazines and movies.

  While there is truth in some of these charges, they overlook critically important counter-trends that generate diversity, not standardization. Television, with its high costs of production and its limited number of channels, is still necessarily dependent upon very large audiences. But in almost every other communications medium we can trace a decreasing reliance on mass audiences. Everywhere the "market segmentation" process is at work.

  A generation ago, American movie-goers saw almost nothing but Hollywood-made films aimed at capturing the so-called mass audience. Today in cities across the country these "mainstream" movies are supplemented by foreign movies, art films, sex movies, and a whole stream of specialized motion pictures consciously designed to appeal to sub-markets – surfers, hot-rodders, motorcyclists, and the like. Output is so specialized that it is even possible, in New York at least, to find a theater patronized almost exclusively by homosexuals who watch the antics of transvestites and "drag queens" filmed especially for them.

  All this helps account for the trend toward smaller movie theaters in the United States and Europe. According to the Economist, "The days of the 4000-seater Trocadero ... are over ... The old-style mass cinema audience of regular once-a-weekers has gone for good." Instead, multiple small audiences turn out for particular kinds of films, and the economics of the industry are up-ended. Thus Cinecenta has opened a cluster of four 150-seat theaters on a single site in London, and other exhibitors are planning midget movie houses. Once again, advanced technology fosters dehomogenization: the development of in-flight movies has led to new low-cost 16 mm. projection systems that are made to order for the mini-movie. They require no projectionist and only a single machine, instead of the customary two. United Artists is marketing these "cineautomats" on a franchise basis.

  Radio, too, though still heavily oriented toward the mass market, shows some signs of differentiation. Some American stations beam nothing but classical music to upper-income, high education listeners, while others specialize in news, and still others in rock music. (Rock stations are rapidly subdividing into still finer categories: some aim their fare for the undereighteen market; others for a somewhat older group; still others for Negroes.) There are even rudimentary attempts to set up radio stations programming solely for a single profession – physicians, for example. In the future, we can anticipate networks that broadcast for such specialized occupational groups as engineers, accountants and attorneys. Still later, there will be market segmentation not simply along occupational lines, but along socio-economic and psycho-social lines as well.

  It is in publishing, however, that the signs of destandardization are most unmistakable. Until the rise of television, mass magazines were the chief standardizing media in most countries. Carrying the same fiction, the same articles and the same advertisements to hundreds of thousands, even millions of homes, they rapidly spread fashions, political opinions and styles. Like radio broadcasters and moviemakers, publishers tended to seek the largest and most universal audience.

  The competition of television killed off a number of major American magazines such as Collier's and Woman's Home Companion. Those mass market publications that have survived the post-TV shake-up have done so, in part, by turning themselves into a collection of regional and segmentalized editions. Between 1959 and 1969, the number of American magazines offering specialized editions jumped from 126 to 235. Thus every large circulation magazine in the United States today prints slightly different editions for different regions of the country – some publishers offering as many as one hundred variations. Special editions are also addressed to occupational and other groups. The 80,000 physicians and dentists who receive Time each week get a somewhat different magazine than that received by teachers whose edition, in turn, is different from that sent to college students. These "demographic editions" are growing increasingly refined and specialized. In short, mass magazine publishers are busily destandardizing, diversifying their output exactly as the au
tomakers and appliance manufacturers have done.

  Furthermore, the rate of new magazine births has shot way up. According to the Magazine Publishers Association, approximately four new magazines have come into being for every one that died during the past decade. Every week sees a new small-circulation magazine on the stands or in the mails, magazines aimed at mini-markets of surfers, scubadivers and senior citizens, at hot-rodders, credit-card holders, skiers and jet passengers. A varied crop of teenage magazines has sprung up, and most recently we have witnessed something no "mass society" pundit would have dared predict a few years ago: a rebirth of local monthlies. Today scores of American cities such as Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Diego and Atlanta, boast fat, slick, well-supported new magazines devoted entirely to local or regional matters. This is hardly a sign of the erosion of differences. Rather, we are getting a richer mix, a far greater choice of magazines than ever before. And, as the UNESCO survey showed, the same is true of books.

  The number of different titles published each year has risen so sharply, and is now so large (more than 30,000 in the United States) that one suburban matron has complained, "It's getting hard to find someone who's read the same book as you. How can you even carry on a conversation about reading?" She may be overstating the case, but book clubs, for example, are finding it increasingly more difficult to choose monthly selections that appeal to large numbers of divergent readers.

  Nor is the process of media differentiation confined to commercial publishing alone. Non-commercial literary magazines are proliferating. "Never in American history have there been as many such magazines as there are today," reports The New York Times Book Review. Similarly, "underground newspapers" have sprung up in dozens of American and European cities. There are at least 200 of these in the United States, many of them supported by advertising placed by leading record manufacturers. Appealing chiefly to hippies, campus radicals and the rock audience, they have become a tangible force in the formation of opinion among the young. From London's IT and the East Village Other in New York, to the Kudzu in Jackson, Mississippi, they are heavily illustrated, often color-printed, and jammed with ads for "psychedelicatessens" and dating services. Underground papers are even published in high schools. To observe the growth of these grass-roots publications and to speak of "mass culture" or "standardization" is to blind oneself to the new realities.