Future Shock author foresaw the information age
Alvin Toffler, the celebrated author of Future Shock, the first in a trilogy of bestselling books that presciently forecast how people and institutions of the late 20th century would contend with the immense strains and soaring opportunities of accelerating change, died June 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.
Toffler was a self-trained social science scholar and successful freelance magazine writer in the mid-1960s when he decided to spend five years studying the underlying causes of a cultural upheaval that he saw overtaking the United States and other developed countries.
The fruit of his research, Future Shock (1970), sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages, catapulting Toffler to international fame. It is still in print.
In the book, in which he synthesized disparate facts from every corner of the globe, he concluded that the convergence of science, capital and communications was producing such swift change that it was creating an entirely new kind of society.
His predictions about the consequences to culture, the family, gov- ernment and the economy were remarkably accurate.
He foresaw the development of cloning, the popularity and influence of personal computers and the invention of the Internet, cable television and telecommuting.
“The roaring current of change,” he said, was producing visible and measurable effects in individuals that fractured marriages, overwhelmed families and caused “confusional breakdowns” manifested in rising crime, drug use and social alienation. He saw these phenomena as human psychological responses to disorientation and proposed that they were challenging the structures of communities, institutions and nations.
He continued these themes in two successful followup books, The Third Wave (1980) and Powershift (1990), assisted by his wife, Heidi Toffler, who served as a researcher and editor for the trilogy and was a coauthor of subsequent books.
Toffler popularized the phrase “information overload.”
His warnings could be bleak, cautioning that people and institutions that failed to keep pace with change would face ruin. But he was optimistic. He was among the first authors to recognize that knowledge, not labour and raw materials, would become the most important economic resource of advanced societies.
Toffler’s work found an eager readership among the general public, on college campuses, in corporate suites and in national governments.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, met the Tofflers in the 1970s and became close to them.
He said The Third Wave had immensely influenced his own thinking and was “one of the great seminal works of our time.”
Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China convened conferences to discuss The Third Wave in the early 1980s, and in 1985 the book was the No. 2 bestseller in China. Only the speeches of leader Deng Xiaoping sold more copies.
Toffler was born in New York and raised in Brooklyn, the elder of two children of Sam and Rose Toffler, immigrants from Poland. His father was a furrier.
Alvin aspired to be a writer from the time he was 7 years old, he told interviewers. His inspiration, he said, came from an uncle and aunt — Phil Album, an editor, and Ruth Album, a poet — who lived with the Tofflers.
“They were Depression-era literary intellectuals,” Toffler said in an interview in 2006, “and they always talked about exciting ideas.”
Toffler enrolled in New York University in 1946 and, by his account, spent the next four years only mildly interested in his academic work. He was far more engaged in political activism. In the fall of 1948, during a brief trip home from helping to register black voters in North Carolina, he met his future wife, Adelaide Elizabeth Farrell, known as Heidi.
The couple later moved to Cleveland, then at the very centre of industrial America. They lived on the city’s west side and took production jobs in separate factories. Toffler learned to weld and repair machinery and came to understand in the most personal way the toll that physical labour can have on industrial workers.
At night, Toffler wrote poetry and fiction and discovered he was proficient in neither. But he still aspired to be a writer. In 1954, soon after the birth of the couple’s only child, Karen, he persuaded the editor of Industry and Welding, a national trade magazine published in Cleveland, to hire him as a reporter.
After working as a reporter for a national trade newspaper and as a columnist for Fortune magazine, Toffler began a freelance writing career covering politics, technology and social science for scholarly journals and writing long interviews for Playboy magazine. His 1964 interview with Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov was considered one of the magazine’s best.