A highly personal look at jobs, identity, sex roles, information age politics, hidden forces driving the economy, and the pitfalls and promises of social change.
Alvin Eugene Toffler was an American writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide. He is regarded as one of the world's outstanding futurists. Toffler was an associate editor of Fortune magazine. In his early works he focused on technology and its impact, which he termed "information overload". In 1970, his first major book about the future, Future Shock, became a worldwide best-seller and has sold over 6 million copies. He and his wife Heidi Toffler (1929–2019), who collaborated with him for most of his writings, moved on to examining the reaction to changes in society with another best-selling book, The Third Wave, in 1980. In it, he foresaw such technological advances as cloning, personal computers, the Internet, cable television and mobile communication. His later focus, via their other best-seller, Powershift, (1990), was on the increasing power of 21st-century military hardware and the proliferation of new technologies. He founded Toffler Associates, a management consulting company, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, visiting professor at Cornell University, faculty member of the New School for Social Research, a White House correspondent, and a business consultant. Toffler's ideas and writings were a significant influence on the thinking of business and government leaders worldwide, including China's Zhao Ziyang, and AOL founder Steve Case.
I thought I had read all of Alvin (and Heidi) Toffler’s futurist books, but I had missed a few of the less popular ones. I was pleasantly surprised to find this hardback in a library sale, and enjoyed the musky old-book scent and the Kroch’s & Brentano’s price sticker. The book came out the year I started a well-paying job and started buying books at places like Kroch’s, so it was nice to harken back. About the book: Reading it was like revisiting the heady late 70s, where futurists talk about trilateralism, the promise of interactive cable TV, and the false fear of Japanese productivity. Toffler was the only author I read that talked about Marxism, and here it is a constant theme. This is not the typically “authored” book. The book is a culmination of a number of interview questions and answers, and the interviewers seemed very much in the academic/philosophical world, and many of the “questions” asked of Toffler were thinly veiled attempts to shoot down his theories or cause him to say something contradicting something else he said. The games of academics. Toffler has none of it. Good for him. This was mostly just a rehash of “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave” concepts, but told in this q&a manner you might expect from a hosted television talk show. And no surprise, Toffler talks about filming documentaries and giving speeches about his concepts throughout. There is a little bit of personal autobiography that adds to the interesting parts here, but overall, I’d suggest this only for those that want additional background or slightly deeper discussion of his two top books, from around the same time those books came out. Now to get back to my interactive cable TV.
În luna iulie a anului 1970, a apărut o carte intitulata „Şocul viitorului”. Până în 1980, s-au vândut peste şapte milioane de exemplare, în condiţiile în care cartea nu vorbeşte despre Hollywood sau sex. Nu oferă nici un sfat practic, nici sisteme de îmbogăţire rapidă. Este o lucrare serioasă, de critică şi analiză socială, care şi-a lăsat adânc amprenta asupra cititorilor din toate domeniile vieţii. Însăşi expresia „şoc al viitorului” a pătruns în vocabularul cotidian, iar acum figurează în numeroase dicţionare.
În 1980, autorul cărţii „Şocul viitorului”, Alvin Toffler, a publicat „Al Treilea Val” ― o carte şi mai savantă, analitică şi angajată social decât „Şocul viitorului”. Şi aceasta a devenit un best-seller internaţional. A spart piaţa în Japonia. S-a tradus în daneză, ebraică şi turcă, pentru a nu mai menţiona limbile franceză, germană şi spaniolă. A fost interzisă în Arabia Saudită şi publicată la Peking. Când s-a declarat legea marţială la Varşovia, tocmai era în lucru traducerea poloneză. În perioada când a dat interviurile din acest volum, domnul Toffler lucra cu televiziunile japoneză, canadiană şi americană, la realizarea unor emisiuni majore bazate pe „Al Treilea Val”, cu posibilitatea de a transmite mesajele autorului unui public telespectator şi mai larg, în întreaga lume.
Read to see if he predicted accurately what has come about. First noticeable absence, in the index - social media is not listed. In a sense, the rise of social media has invalidated many of his premises but as I have read Future Shock, Third Wave and Power Shift way back in the day, and this one was published in 1983 and the world has changed far more rapidly that he predicted and with fewer hopeful signs of it emerging unscathed. He warned in 1983 that our political systems were obsolete and would not be able to cope with the speed of change....today it is obvious that that was only too true and that those political systems spent the last decades devolving into crisis after crisis and lawlessness until they are all but unrecognizable. They refused to effect change and so change came unbidden and without intelligent organization. Tipping points are being reached all over the world on everything from economics, ecology, population growth, refugees and immigration and the list goes on. His books were a warning flag raised and ignored.