Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  Significantly, this thrust toward media diversity is based not on affluence alone, but, as we have seen before, on the new technology – the very machines that are supposedly going to homogenize us and crush all vestiges of variety. Advances in offset printing and xerography have radically lowered the costs of short-run publishing, to the point at which high school students can (and do) finance publication of their underground press with pocket money. Indeed, the office copying machine – some versions selling now for as little as thirty dollars – makes possible such extremely short production runs that, as McLuhan puts it, every man can now be his own publisher. In America, where the office copying machine is almost as universal as the adding machine, it would appear that every man is. The rocketing number of periodicals that land on one's desk is dramatic testimony to the ease of publication.

  Meanwhile, hand-held cameras and new video-tape equipment are similarly revolutionizing the ground rules of cinema. New technology has put camera and film into the hands of thousands of students and amateurs, and the underground movie – crude, colorful, perverse, highly individualized and localized – is flourishing even more than the underground press.

  These technological advances have their analog in audio commmunications, too, where the omnipresence of tape recorders permits every man to be his own "broadcaster." Andre Moosmann, chief Eastern European expert for Radio-Television Francaise, reports the existence of widely known pop singers in Russia and Poland who have never appeared on radio or television, but whose songs and voices have been popularized through the medium of tape recordings alone. Tapings of Bulat Okudzava's songs, for example, pass from hand to hand, each listener making his own duplicate – a process that totalitarian governments find difficult to prevent or police. "It goes quickly," says Moosmann, "if a man makes one tape and a friend makes two, the rate of increase can be very fast."

  Radicals have often complained that the means of communication are monopolized by a few. Sociologist C. Wright Mills went so far, if my memory is correct, as to urge cultural workers to take over the means of communication. This turns out to be hardly necessary. The advance of communications technology is quietly and rapidly de-monopolizing communications without a shot being fired. The result is a rich destandardization of cultural output.

  Television, therefore, may still be homogenizing taste; but the other media have already passed beyond the technological state at which standardization is necessary. When technical breakthroughs alter the economics of television by providing more channels and lowering costs of production, we can anticipate that that medium, too, will begin to fragment its output and cater to, rather than counter, the increasing diversity of the consuming public. Such breakthroughs are, in fact, closer than the horizon. The invention of electronic video recording, the spread of cable television, the possibility of broadcasting direct from satellite to cable systems, all point to vast increases in program variety. For it should now be clear that tendencies toward uniformity represent only one stage in the development of any technology. A dialectical process is at work, and we are on the edge of a long leap toward unparalleled cultural diversity.

  The day is already in sight when books, magazines, newspapers, films and other media will, like the Mustang, be offered to the consumer on a design-it-yourself basis. Thus in the mid-sixties, Joseph Naughton, a mathematician and computer specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested a system that would store a consumer's profile – data about his occupation and interests – in a central computer. Machines would then scan newspapers, magazines, video tapes, films and other material, match them against the individual's interest profile, and instantaneously notify him when something appears that concerns him. The system could be hitched to facsimile machines and TV transmitters that would actually display or print out the material in his own living room. By 1969 the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun was publicly demonstrating a low cost "Telenews" system for printing newspapers in the home, and Matsushita Industries of Osaka was displaying a competitive system known as TV Fax (H). These are the first steps toward the newspaper of the future – a peculiar newspaper, indeed, offering no two viewer-readers the same content. Mass communication, under a system like this, is "de-massified." We move from homogeneity to heterogeneity.

  It is obstinate nonsense to insist, in the face of all this, that the machines of tomorrow will turn us into robots, steal our individuality, eliminate cultural variety, etc., etc. Because primitive mass production imposed certain uniformities, does not mean that super-industrial machines will do the same. The fact is that the entire thrust of the future carries away from standardization – away from uniform goods, away from homogenized art, mass produced education and "mass" culture. We have reached a dialectical turning point in the technological development of society. And technology, far from restricting our individuality, will multiply our choices – and our freedom – exponentially.

  Whether man is prepared to cope with the increased choice of material and cultural wares available to him is, however, a totally different question. For there comes a time when choice, rather than freeing the individual, becomes so complex, difficult and costly, that it turns into its opposite. There comes a time, in short, when choice turns into overchoice and freedom into un-freedom.

  To understand why, we must go beyond this examination of our expanding material and cultural choice. We must look at what is happening to social choice as well.

  Chapter 13

  A SURFEIT OF SUBCULTS

  Thirty miles north of New York City, within easy reach of its towers, its traffic and its urban temptations, lives a young taxicab driver, a former soldier, who boasts 700 surgical stitches in his body. These stitches are not the result of combat wounds, nor of an accident involving his taxi. Instead, they are the result of his chief recreation: rodeo riding.

  On a cab driver's modest salary, this man spends more than $1200 a year to own a horse, stable it, and keep it in perfect trim. Periodically hitching a horsetrailer to his auto, he drives a little over one hundred miles to a place outside Philadelphia called "Cow Town." There, with others like himself, he participates in roping, steer wrestling, bronco busting, and other strenuous contests, the chief prize of which have been repeated visits to a hospital emergency ward.

  Despite its proximity, New York holds no fascination for this fellow. When I met him he was twenty-three, and he had visited it only once or twice in his life. His entire interest is focused on the cow ring, and he is a member of a tiny group of rodeo fanatics who form a little-known underground in the United States. They are not professionals who earn a living from this atavistic sport. Nor are they simply people who affect Western-style boots, hats, denim jackets and leather belts. They are a tiny, but authentic subcult lost within the vastness and complexity of the most highly technological civilization in the world.

  This odd group not only engages the cab driver's passion, it consumes his time and money. It affects his family, his friends, his ideas. It provides a set of standards against which he measures himself. In short, it rewards him with something that many of us have difficulty finding: an identity.

  The techno-societies, far from being drab and homogenized, are honeycombed with just such colorful groupings – hippies and hot rodders, theosophists and flying saucer fans, skindivers and skydivers, homosexuals, computerniks, vegetarians, bodybuilders and Black Muslims.

  Today the hammerblows of the super-industrial revolution are literally splintering the society. We are multiplying these social enclaves, tribes and minicults among us almost as fast as we are multiplying automotive options. The same destandardizing forces that make for greater individual choice with respect to products and cultural wares, are also destandardizing our social structures. This is why, seemingly overnight, new subcults like the hippies burst into being. We are, in fact, living through a "subcult explosion."

  The importance of this cannot be overstated. For we are all deeply influenced, our identities are shaped, by the subcults with which
we choose, unconsciously or not, to identify ourselves. It is easy to ridicule a hippie or an uneducated young man who is willing to suffer 700 stitches in an effort to test and "find" himself. Yet we are all rodeo riders or hippies in one sense: we, too, search for identity by attaching ourselves to informal cults, tribes or groups of various kinds. And the more numerous the choices, the more difficult the quest.

  SCIENTISTS AND STOCKBROKERS

  The proliferation of subcults is most evident in the world of work. Many subcults spring up around occupational specialties. Thus, as the society moves toward greater specialization, it generates more and more subcultural variety.

  The scientific community, for example, is splitting into finer and finer fragments. It is criss-crossed with formal organizations and associations whose specialized journals, conferences and meetings are rapidly multiplying in number. But these "open" distinctions according to subject matter are matched by "hidden" distinctions as well. It is not simply that cancer researchers and astronomers do different things; they talk different languages, tend to have different personality types; they think, dress and live differently. (So marked are these distinctions that they often interfere with interpersonal relationships. Says a woman scientist: "My husband is a microbiologist and I am a theoretical physicist, and sometimes I wonder if we mutually exist.")

  Scientists within a specialty tend to hang together with their own kind, forming themselves into tight little subcultural cells, to which they turn for approval and prestige, as well as for guidance about such things as dress, political opinions, and life style.

  As science expands and the scientific population grows, new specialties spring up, fostering more and still more diversity at this "hidden" or informal level. In short, specialization breeds subcults.

  This process of cellular division within a profession is dramatically marked in finance. Wall Street was once a relatively homogeneous community. "It used to be," says one prominent sociological observer of the money men, "that you came down here from St. Paul's and you made a lot of money and belonged to the Racquet Club and you had an estate on the North Shore, and your daughters were debutantes. You did it all by selling bonds to your exclassmates." The remark is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but Wall Street was, in fact, one big White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subcult, and its members did tend to go to the same schools, join the same clubs, engage in the same sports (tennis, golf and squash), attend the same churches (Presbyterian and Episcopalian), and vote for the same party (Republican).

  Anybody who still thinks of Wall Street in these terms, however, is getting his ideas from the novels of Auchincloss or Marquand rather than from the new, fast-changing reality. Today, Wall Street has splintered, and a young man entering the business has a choice of a whole clutch of competing subcultural affiliations. In investment banking the old conservative WASP grouping still lingers on. There are still some old-line "white shoe" firms of which it is said "They'll have a black partner before they hire a few." Yet in the mutual fund field, a relatively new specialized segment of the financial industry, Greek, Jewish and Chinese names abound, and some star salesmen are black. Here the entire style of life, the implicit values of the group, are quite different. Mutual fund people are a separate tribe.

  "Not everyone even wants to be a WASP any more," says a leading financial writer. Indeed, many young, aggressive Wall Streeters, even when they do happen to be WASP in origin, reject the classical Wall Street subcult and identify themselves instead with one or more of the pluralistic social groupings that now swarm and sometimes collide in the canyons of Lower Manhattan.

  As specialization continues, as research extends into new fields and probes more deeply into old ones, as the economy continues to create new technologies and services, subcults will continue to multiply. Those social critics who inveigh against "mass society" in one breath and denounce "over-specialization" in the next are simply flapping their tongues. Specialization means a movement away from sameness.

  Despite much loose talk about the need for "generalists," there is little evidence that the technology of tomorrow can be run without armies of highly trained specialists. We are rapidly changing the types of expertise needed. We are demanding more "multi-specialists" (men who know one field deeply, but who can cross over into another as well) rather than rigid, "mono-specialists." But we shall continue to need and breed ever more refined work specialties as the technical base of society increases in complexity For this reason alone, we must expect the variety and number of subcults in the society to increase.

  THE FUN SPECIALISTS

  Even if technology were to free millions of people from the need to work in the future, we would find the same push toward diversity operating among those who are left free to play. For we are already producing large numbers of "fun specialists." We are rapidly multiplying not merely types of work, but types of play as well.

  The number of acceptable pastimes, hobbies, games, sports and entertainments is climbing rapidly, and the growth of a distinct subcult built around surfing, for example, demonstrates that, at least for some, a leisure-time commitment can also serve as the basis for an entire life style. The surfing subcult is a signpost pointing to the future.

  "Surfing has already developed a kind of symbolism that gives it the character of a secret fraternity or a religious order," writes Remi Nadeau. "The identifying sign is a shark's tooth, St. Christopher medal, or Maltese cross hung loosely about one's neck ... For a long time, the most accepted form of transportation has been a wood-paneled Ford station wagon of ancient vintage." Surfers display sores and nodules on their knees and feet as proud proof of their involvement. Suntan is de rigeur. Hair is styled in a distinctive way. Members of the tribe spend endless hours debating the prowess of such in-group heroes as J. J. Moon, and his followers buy J. J. Moon T-shirts, surfboards, and fan club memberships.

  Surfers are only one of many such play-based subcults. Among skydivers, for example, the name J. J. Moon is virtually unknown, and so are the peculiar rituals and fashions of the wave-cresters. Skydivers talk, instead, about the feat of Rod Pack, who not long ago jumped from an airplane without a parachute, was handed one by a companion in mid-air, put it on, opened it, and landed safely. Skydivers have their own little world, as do glider enthusiasts, scuba-divers, hot rodders, drag racers and motorcyclists. Each of these represents a leisurebased subcult organized around a technological device. As the new technology makes new sports possible, we can anticipate the formation of highly varied new play cults.

  Leisure-time pursuits will become an increasingly important basis for differences between people, as the society itself shifts from a work orientation toward greater involvement in leisure. In the United States, since the turn of the century alone, the society's measurable commitment to work has plummeted by nearly a third. This is a massive redeployment of the society's time and energy. As this commitment declines further, we shall advance into an era of breathtaking fun specialism – much of it based on sophisticated technology.

  We can anticipate the formation of subcults built around space activity, holography, mind-control, deep-sea diving, submarining, computer gaming and the like. We can even see on the horizon the creation of certain anti-social leisure cults – tightly organized groups of people who will disrupt the workings of society not for material gain, but for the sheer sport of "beating the system" – a development foreshadowed in such films as Duffy and The Thomas Crown Affair. Such groups may attempt to tamper with governmental or corporate computer programs, re-route mail, intercept and alter radio and television broadcasts, perform elaborately theatrical hoaxes, tinker with the stock market, corrupt the random samples upon which political or other polls are based, and even, perhaps, commit complexly plotted robberies and assassinations. Novelist Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 describes a fictional underground group who have organized their own private postal system and maintained it for generations. Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley has gone so far as to propose, i
n a terrifying short story called The Seventh Victim, the possibility that society might legalize murder among certain specified "players" who hunt one another and are, in turn, hunted. This ultimate game would permit those who are dangerously violent to work off their aggressions within a managed framework.

  Bizarre as some of this may sound, it would be well not to rule out the seemingly improbable, for the realm of leisure, unlike that of work, is little constrained by practical considerations. Here imagination has free play, and the mind of man can conjure up incredible varieties of "fun." Given enough time, money and, for some of these, technical skill, the men of tomorrow will be capable of playing in ways never dreamed of before. They will play strange sexual games. They will play games with the mind. They will play games with society And in so doing, by choosing among the unimaginably broad options, they will form subcults and further set themselves off from one another.

  THE YOUTH GHETTO

  Subcults are multiplying – the society is cracking – along age lines, too. We are becoming "age specialists" as well as work and play specialists There was a time when people were divided roughly into children, "young persons," and adults. It wasn't until the forties that the loosely defined term "young persons" began to be replaced by the more restrictive term "teenager," referring specifically to the years thirteen to nineteen. (In fact, the word was virtually unknown in England until after World War II.)