If you adhere to proper nutrition, then avocados are probably in ...
The book of the American futurologist and publicist E. Toffler "Future Shock", the book is undoubtedly the bestseller of the last decades. The author draws attention to the unheard-of pace that is characteristic of modern cultural and political changes. Mankind can die not because of an ecological catastrophe, a nuclear reaction or depletion of resources. The shock that people experience leads to psychological numbness, to the very real danger that lies in wait for humanity. This is the main threat. We must recognize it and, if possible, eliminate it. The author hopes that the measures he proposed will help a person survive in the new reality and prevent future shock.
GOD OF AMAZING TRANSFORMATIONS
You wake up in the morning and find that the world, which for many years was perceived as the background of your life, has changed. Everything you are used to becomes completely different. And in record time, literally every second. For example, last year this day was considered a great holiday. You sat at the screen and watched the demo. Friends called you, postmen brought postcards. This day is still considered a holiday. However, no one calls, no congratulations. There is only one form left. Why is she? You walk into a store and are amazed at how much the prices have gone up.
No, you can get used to the fact that this day is not a holiday at all, but such prices ... Who could have foreseen that a bunch of onions ... Or, let's say, a jar of vaseline ... It's probably time to put up with it, because there are still many trials ahead. But the soul does not keep up with the changes. The world seems hostile and frightening incomprehensible.
A friend calls and says that a pigalina from their class has become a currency prostitute. You discuss this issue for a long time and even manage to ask how the health of her well-bred mother is. And the one who sat at the same desk with a pigali and dreamed of becoming an academician, now, it turns out, walks in a luxurious leather jacket. He works as a janitor...
All representations have shifted. An acquaintance called a friend who entered graduate school a fool. Underpass deafens you with accordion sounds. You slow down. A few months ago, you saw this musician on the cover of a fashionable illustrated magazine... In the evening, a television presenter appears on the screen and comments on the collapse of the ruble. The miners block the railway lines. Teachers and professors are looking for work in commercial stalls. They say that a wolf can be struck by a heart attack if the space in which he lives suddenly turns out to be narrowed. And what happens to a person who suddenly finds out that he cannot appear in another area where people of a different nationality live? All values have changed at once. The teacher sometimes does not know what he should now tell the children - times have changed. The scientist is amazed that he has lost his social status. A worker of a recently promising enterprise suddenly turned out to be unemployed. The Red Director, thrice decorated, still hopes that everything will return to its previous course. However, there is less and less hope...
The usual way of life is rapidly collapsing, things that until recently constituted the meaning of our existence are becoming a thing of the past. Orientations change. A specialist in atheism wears an Orthodox beard. The teacher of scientific communism directs the cooperative. Shrines are falling down. A girl who has joined a firm unexpectedly receives an invitation to sleep with her boss. "For what reason?" she asks. They answer her: “Are you crazy?” Political domestic feuds turn into bloody massacres. Man remains alone in the face of the impending unknown.
When fragments of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock appeared in our magazines in the early 1970s, we read those pages like a fantasy novel. We, living in the rhythm of stagnation, in archaic social structures, it all seemed far away, although it made one surrender to the waves of imagination. Almost thirty years have passed since the book of the American journalist and sociologist was published.
Do we need it today, on the threshold of the new millennium? Will it find a response in the hearts of Russians? Finally, did the fashion forecaster's predictions come true? After all, the author himself admitted that his work in the stream of rapid transformations would also be outdated. Toffler's book is the product of a vibrant social imagination. Although the author constantly refers to scientific publications, statistics, everyday examples, his work reveals in many ways the world of fantasy, productive looking into the future.
Toffler wrote that humanity is capturing a previously unknown psychological state, which in its effect can be equated to a disease. This disease also has its own name “futuroshok” - “shock of the future”. Mankind can die not because the storerooms of the earth are exhausted, atomic energy gets out of control, or tormented nature perishes. People will die out due to the fact that they cannot withstand psychological stress.
Futurochok is characterized by a sudden, overwhelming loss of a sense of reality, the ability to navigate life, caused by fear of the near future. Before early XXI in. millions of ordinary physically healthy and mentally normal people will suddenly come face to face with the future. Will they be able to adapt to the ever-increasing pressure of events, knowledge, science, technology, various kinds of information? Will this lead to serious social and psychological consequences? Is humanity only now faced with these problems? Is it only in our country that a person is pushed out of his usual niche? Medieval man saw the future as a mysterious and dark force. He perceived even a joyful day with anxiety: what if these pleasures turn into executions at the Last Judgment. Wars, epidemics, famine were perceived as signs of the impending end of the world. Temple frescoes depicting episodes doomsday, made the hearts of believers tremble at the mere thought of what awaits them on the other side of life, in the afterlife.
Pushkin said about his hero: "And he is in a hurry to live, and he is in a hurry to feel." And at that time there were people chasing fashion, thirsting for change, inclined to feel the fleetingness in their feelings. But the poet nevertheless shows irony, a distance emerges. The world was still solid, or at least it seemed so. Chasing after novelty, people still lived in a familiar environment, in the fetters of prejudices and the usual course of life. However, in our century, amazing transformations have become noticeable. Toffler shows that the pace of change has accelerated unheard of. We now cannot even imagine what will happen, say, in a couple of years. If a few years ago I, a professor at the Institute of Philosophy, had been told that a Cathedral of Christ the Savior would grow in front of our building on the site of the pool, or that the remains of the last Russian Tsar would be buried with the participation of the President of our country, I would undoubtedly have experienced a shock ...
AT Soviet years it was such a dumb joke. The entertainer says: "I love this woman for life, register her in my apartment for three months." Who would have thought that a decade later, Toffler would seriously discuss the idea of temporary marriage as a sociological reality in his book. A person can register in his apartment not one wife, but a whole series: marriages are no longer made in heaven, are not generated by love, and do not at all assume that the newlyweds will live together until the end of their days. After many centuries, on the threshold of another millennium, humanity, it would seem, should no longer be afraid of its future. Armed the latest technology people have learned to predict their lives for several years and even decades. But here's the problem - the forecast is bleak. The pantries of the earth have been exhausted to the bottom. There is nothing to saturate our voracious technical civilization.
Having created the most powerful technique, a person changed the rhythm and course of his life. And here it really turned out that the main trouble was not at all a shortage of raw materials for production, not the destruction of ecological environment. Scientific thought is trying to avert these catastrophes. The nightmare is different: the psychological resources of a person are not unlimited. It's not that an ozone hole forms or an oil well runs dry. And not even that, falling asleep in one state, you can wake up in a completely different one ... First of all, the human psyche can not stand it.
A few decades ago, the Izvestia newspaper published the feuilleton "Air Hooligans". It told about how the pilots, passing by the monument to Pushkin in Moscow, saw a drunk at the monument. They carefully picked him up, carried him on the plane and, having completed the flight, laid him, cordially, near the monument to Taras Shevchenko, already in Kyiv. Can you imagine the shock of a sober person when he woke up? .. However, now these are childish pranks. The whole country can meet the working morning near the new tablets...
Toffler's book will remain a bestseller for a long time to come. However, it should not be read as an unconditional revelation. The brilliant work clearly lacks metaphysical elaboration. The study is very vulnerable from the point of view of cultural studies, philosophical anthropology and psychology. Speaking of diversity as the embodiment of freedom, the author relies on an extremely narrowed cultural background. The sociologist is fascinated by the American model of life. The god of unthinkable transformations - the cult of novelty - was born in this country.
Toffler is convinced that a super-industrial civilization is a universal phenomenon. But there are a wide variety of cultures in the world today. Will modernization become a universal process? - Humanity does not yet have an answer to this question. Yes, many Asian countries - Japan, China, Korea - are moving towards a super-industrial model. However, cultural identity is not erased, not eliminated. Remains different in many cultures and the image of time.
It is no coincidence that another American bestseller was born, which predicts not only the painful process of the convergence of civilizations, but also their coming conflict. The reader guessed that we are talking about the concept of Samuel Huntington. The problem of mankind is not only to get used to change. It lies in something else - how to preserve the value-psychological core of culture. In our country, too, a psychological explosion from change. But we are shocked not only by the future, but also by the past. For us, this is far from being a psychological problem only ... The world did not heed Toffler's warning. You never know what a modern futurologist can frighten us with. Only a few sane people hurried to change their lifestyle, or rather, tried to protect themselves from radical dynamics. Toffler does not turn to philosophical anthropology. He does not, in essence, attempt to raise the question of what human nature is. Who is a person by nature - an innovator or a conservative? Or otherwise - what tendencies in society can prevail? Shouldn't they be in some kind of harmony?
It is no coincidence that after the publication of Toffler's book in many Western countries the conservative wave began to gain strength. Philosophers and politicians began to think about how adapted a person is to these changes as a biological, psychological being. Neoconservatives started talking about how important it is for a person to feel the solidity of being. After all, in the past social cycle often correlated with cultural, the latter was most often longer. Now, during the life of one generation, cultural cycles change one after another, creating an avalanche of civilizational upheavals.
Toffler does not raise the question of what a psychological norm is. He believes that a person who is poorly adapted to a changing reality is psychologically flawed. He needs to explain that the world is constantly changing. If he wants to adapt to reality, it is important for him to rebuild his psyche, to avoid future shock. But suppose people succeeded. People do not feel discomfort from the fact that everything around is rapidly changing, is it possible to say that a person who has adapted to reality is not a neurotic, but a full-fledged personality.
Is it a psychological norm - a person knocked out of the bosom of the family, from the familiar landscape, who has lost attachment and a sense of stability? Most likely, such a person, realizing unlimited freedom, will turn out to be a psychopath. Perhaps the best story about this is our Russian life.
A person born in a yaranga is able to enter a university and acquire a completely different status. He can also return to his native village and bring elements of an unfamiliar culture into his life. Toffler saw the source of future shock only in the machine, in technology. It is her speed that gives rise to unheard-of rates of mutations. That is why, he believed, millions of people are seized with a growing sense of anxiety. They cannot navigate in the life around them, they lose the ability to intelligently manage the events that fall on their heads like a swift avalanche. Unaccountable fear, mass neuroses, actions that cannot be rationally explained, unbridled acts of violence - all this, according to the American expert, are only mild symptoms of the disease that awaits us ahead.
The reality of Russian reality and those countries that until recently constituted a single space with it, significantly changed Toffler's expertise. It's not just about cars, not about the pace of life that technical civilization imposes on us. Social and cultural life is being transformed. A person does not simply join in the pace of unheard-of accelerations. He generally catapults, and repeatedly, into other worlds.
Yesterday, a respectable individual suddenly becomes an outcast. Those who are accustomed to the land of their ancestors turn out to be a refugee. Orthodox falls into the Islamic environment. A man who has been cultivating morality all his life suddenly discovers that he must live in a gang of thieves. The homeless are expected to develop the qualities of a skilled businessman. The Victim of the Peasantization Syndrome Is Sentenced to Ownership land plot. A person who is ready to exchange his shares for alcohol and a pack of buckwheat is assigned the role of a co-owner of capital. A person who has fallen into poverty from a delayed pension is offered to pay for housing according to Western standards ...
Let us ask again: is this phenomenon peculiar only to our time? Of course, similar phenomena can be traced in any historical era. Imagine the state of a Scythian barbarian, captured and sold into slavery in some city ancient Greece or Rome. Cut off from his familiar environment, faced face to face with an unfamiliar culture, this man had to go through a state of shock.
Or another kind of example. Consider Mark Twain's famous story The Prince and the Pauper.
A rootless and poor boy finds himself in the position of a crown prince. But instead of thanking fate, he experiences constant anxiety, fear of an unusual reality.
However, most people who find themselves in an unfamiliar environment live in the hope of returning to their native country with their usual way of life, or find solace in the fact that they can find themselves in their environment at any moment. Victims of future shock are deprived of this comforting thought. In our country, the scale of social and cultural metamorphosis is fantastically huge. In addition, the world where the Red Banner dream and hope calls is irretrievably lost. Behind the ruins, in front of psychologically unbearable torment.
Take a person away from his native culture and throw him into a completely new environment, where he will have to react instantly to many completely new ideas about time, space, work, sex, etc., and you will see what an amazing confusion will take possession of him. And if you also take away any hope of returning to a familiar social environment, confusion will develop into depression. Psychological numbness is a terrible syndrome of today.
The plane crashed near Ivanovo. Passengers and crew died. Technique failed? Nothing happened. An unfortunate coincidence of meteorological conditions? A fatal combination of formidable factors? Don't guess... The experts blamed the crew commander for everything. He acted correctly, competently. But in a state of some amazing slowness. The crew commander can only be charged with one thing - he led the flight in a state of psychological prostration ... However, is he sane?
Isn't this case worthy of careful comprehension? Tormented by immense human fatigue, air traffic controllers demand an increase in salaries. At the last limit, the operator of the nuclear shield operates. The resigned official turns into a maniac, trying to restore the lost balance with the last surge of the tormented psyche. A miner descends into the face, driven to despair by the senselessness of the struggle for timely pay ...
Let's imagine what a person's disorientation can be if chaos sets in and the entire hierarchy of values begins to change constantly. Let us imagine that not an individual person, but a whole society of people of different ages, including the weakest, the least intelligent, the least adapted, was transferred to the world we have outlined. The result will be not just a futuroshok, but something more, which does not yet have its own designation.
The changes taking place around us have taken on the character of a grandiose snowfall. Most people are completely unprepared for them. A grandmother who spent her whole life saving up for a funeral and now realizing that she will go to another world without a proper burial. Residents of a cooperative house saving money for overhaul at home and having found out that this money is not enough even for a bluing. Academician who nurtured atheism. A physicist, accustomed to despise "lyricists", who will not see orders for research from now on ... A pregnant woman who suddenly faced with the fact that the law does not protect her right to motherhood. It's not only that we have expanded the scope of change, made it bigger - we have changed its pace. An avalanche of rapidly changing events falls upon us, which leads to the transformation of our perception of time. We "feel" life differently than our predecessors, and this is precisely the difference modern man. Imagine such a situation… A medieval knight saw a beautiful lady at a tournament and fell in love. Seeking reciprocity, he writes passionate letters to her, and his messenger, with the greatest tricks, delivers his master's letters to the castle of a lady living on the other side of the kingdom. Imagine how much time must pass before she receives this message and, after carefully considering everything, writes a tender answer, which she forwards with even more precautions to her beloved.
During this time, feelings seem to freeze. Our heroes are able to experience the state that gripped them at the moment of the first meeting, an infinite number of times ... The situation in which they find themselves remains unchanged. Slowly, information comes in that could lead to a change in their feelings. Such a romance can last for years without developing at all. The unfortunate lovers of the Middle Ages are much more likely to die before their love than our contemporaries.
The latter, who have at their disposal a cell phone, mail and other means of communication, do not need to experience the excitement that gripped them during the first date for a long time, as more and more new events rapidly follow. And often modern lovers simply do not have time to sort out their own feelings. However, imagine a situation in the spirit of Toffler's reasoning about the vicissitudes of marriage, that marriage will be reusable. Let's say Pushkin's Tatyana says to Onegin: “It's good that you're back. My marriage to the general is just coming to an end. Now I can be with you for several years ... ”It turns out the dialogue is completely in the spirit of Bernard Shaw:
Can I have you for a minute?
At least for an eternity, if it's not for long...
Modern life young man bears little resemblance to his father's life. The generation gap is widening rapidly. In past centuries, life flowed much more slowly. The story of a beautiful lady could happen to both her great-grandmother and her granddaughter. The measured rhythm of life firmly connected generations with each other, not allowing the “connection of times” to be interrupted.
Modern people, having accelerated the pace of change, broke forever with the past. We have given up our former way of thinking, our former feelings, our former methods of adapting to the changing conditions of life. This is what calls into question the ability of a person to adapt - will he survive in a new environment? Will he be able to adapt to other imperatives? The acceleration of the pace of life no longer fits into the framework of normal human existence; under it, all the social institutions of society are shaken for a while. My boss's car was stolen. He calls a high-ranking police officer. Something comforting is heard from there: “If they stole it with the knowledge of the police, we will help, we will find it. But if this is unorganized crime, I'm sorry, we won't find it ... ”How to adapt to the new status of law enforcement officers?
The increase in the pace of change has a detrimental effect on our psyche, it disturbs the internal balance, changes the way we live. Thus, the external acceleration passes into the internal... The acceleration of change shortens the duration of life situations. This has a devastating effect on the psyche.
Starting social innovations, discussing the details of further "reforms", we completely do not take into account the symptoms of the phenomenon we have named. Here reigns complete complacency. Complete apathy is sometimes mistaken for calm sanity. Psychological numbness - for loyalty. The intelligentsia is more hysterical than the people, the head of the government team broadcasts from the screen.
“Don't dramatize the situation,” they exhort us. I would like to write about the radiant. But does this mean that we should pass by the terrible and inevitable portents that Toffler's book talks about.
Another aspect of Toffler's book is that it talks a lot about scientific discoveries that put a lot of ethical and philosophical problems. With some delay than Toffler expected, they started talking about human cloning, about the possibilities of the modular principle. human relations. More recently, biologists have discovered a gene that carries the completion of the life of a natural organism. It contains information that exhausts itself in the decay of the cell, in the death of the individual. Here it is, the secret of the finiteness of human existence, a deliberate sentence to death. By the way, the gene has been identified, and with the help of a laser, you can burn it out. Will the person become immortal? Maybe. It is possible that in the horizon of biology the problem looks extremely clear ...
And in the dominion of philosophy? Perhaps only a wise man is able to warn mankind against infringement on the mystery of life and death. Only a philosopher, due to his vocation, is obliged to present to the judgment of specialists the ancient intuitions-warnings, the results of the enormous intellectual work of thinkers who talk about the mysteries of life and death. Only a philosopher should give the problem a sharpened metaphysical sound. Philosophy is a storehouse of all sorts of announcements, many of which have no theoretical basis at all. Sometimes these revelations are naive, crafty, reckless, offensive to sanity. But if you stop this gushing power of imagination, a person will cease to be himself. His mind is also depleted. Consciousness will lose its own metaphysical potential.
Toffler has a wonderful image. He talks about the fact that the cards of the Middle Ages are capable of causing a smile today. But without them there would be no modern vision of the world. Through conjecture, through imagination, through philosophical comprehension, people go to the recognition of the world.
But is it necessary to absolutize speed, change, change of situations, the possibility of changing places? I remember that during the years of stagnation I managed to go to Montreal for the International Philosophical Congress. When I returned, I enthusiastically told everyone about unexpected impressions, about the discovery of other cultural standards. A familiar artist cooled me with a phrase, the meaning of which is increasingly being revealed to me now:
One rejoices that he ran along the avenues of an eccentric city, the other is happy that he saw a bush under the window.
Mankind needs active activity, but contemplation is also needed. It must have great potential for adaptability. However, healthy conservatism will not harm people either. Freedom is the shedding of bonds, but it is also a limitation. You should not be a slave to fleeting, endless new experiences, the flow of change. Pity the man who plants a tree but never sees it grow.
P. S. Gurevich, Professor
Ministry of Higher and Secondary
special education
National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek
On the topic: "Alvin Toffler and his work "Future Shock".
Tashkent 2011
Plan.
1. Introduction
2. Biography and prerequisites for writing the book "Future Shock"
3. Main ideas
4. Conclusion
5. List of used literature
Introduction.
Take a look at us. We're in a hurry, we're in a hurry. Each of our days is scheduled in seconds. We get lost in the flow of chaotic information, sometimes forgetting about simple things. We are an information society.
But is it as scary as it sounds this term? Are we slaves of modern technology? Or is it an integral process and natural development of society? What awaits us in the future? Should we be afraid of the coming changes, or we may not even notice their coming?
Questions about the rapid development of society, about their inevitability and impact on our lives were raised back in the 70s of the last century by the writer, sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler in his first work "Future Shock", which became a world bestseller. Whether the popularity of the book is connected with the novelty and relevance of the concepts put forward in it, and whether it is possible, after a few decades, to build this work into a series of prophetic ones, I will try to figure it out further.
Biography and background to writing the book Future Shock
Alvin Toffler is one of the most popular writers and futurists in modern world. Together with his wife Heidi, he wrote several works dedicated to what is happening in modern society changes. His trilogy has become widely known throughout the world due to its relevance and novelty of the concepts put forward in it.
Alvin Toffler was born on October 3, 1928 on the eve of the Great Depression era. Events that took place during this period, including economic and social change strongly influenced the views and worldviews of Toffler. After graduating from university, Toffler and his wife worked in heavy industry for about five years. Toffler later applied his experience in his writings, describing the nature of labor and the difference between physical and intellectual labor.
After a period of work in industry, Toffler shifts his activities to journalism. Since the late 50s, he has been working as a correspondent for several newspapers, and later he is appointed to the post of deputy editor of Fortune magazine.
After studying journalism, Toffler devotes himself to scientific activity and works as a lecturer at various universities, and later receives the title of professor at Cornell University. Currently, Alvin Toffler is an honored figure in the field of literature, law, natural sciences and Management, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In the late 1960s, Toffler was commissioned by IBM to conduct research on the social implications of computer technology. During this period, the main ideas of the author are born, which were first expressed in the article “The Future as a Way of Life”. This article talks about the speed of future changes regarding the informational progress of society. The ideas of accelerating the speed of information progress were further developed in the author's first work entitled "The Shock of the Future", in which he introduces hitherto unused terms and introduces new ideas. The book becomes a bestseller and is gaining popularity in many countries around the world.
In my opinion, the popularity of the book was primarily due to its relevance. The ideas put forward by Toffler, which will be discussed below, are by far the most adequate existing development society. Largely due to Toffler's work in industrial enterprises and his studies of the development of computerization in society, he was able to clearly articulate and popularize his ideas to the masses.
To date, Toffler can be called one of the most popular futurologists in the world. Reading readers' reviews of his book, I noticed that people's opinions agree that what Toffler wrote 40 years ago is the reality surrounding us at the present time.
Key Ideas
When I started reading Future Shock, I was initially pleasantly surprised by the simplicity of the language used in it and the examples that made it easier to understand a particular thought, but later my opinion changed a little. There was a feeling that the author, in some sense, was trying to convey ideas so clearly to readers that at some point you start to wait after an endless stream of examples and analogies for the final conclusion, but it starts to slip away from you under an avalanche of popularization and simplification.
But the concept expressed in the book "Future Shock" carries main idea about the acceleration and inevitability of the future and the colossal changes associated with it. At the very beginning of the book, Toffler introduces the concept of "future shock": "...future shock is not a distant potential danger, but a real disease from which an increasing number of people are already suffering. This psychobiological state can be described in medical and psychiatric terms. It's a disease of change."
Future shock is the psychological reaction of a person or society to rapid and radical changes in its environment caused by the acceleration of technological and social progress. Some scientists still believe that the future shock is actually this moment should be called present shock, since shock is caused by a person's encounter with changes that have already occurred in the environment.
In the first part of the book, Toffler considers the development of mankind with the 800th segment. Toffler writes: “... it was noticed that if the last 50,000 years of human existence are divided into segments of life of approximately 62 years each, then there will be about 800 such segments of life. Of these 800, a total of 650 were in the caves. Only in the last 70 such spans of life has it become possible to effectively transmit information from one generation to another thanks to writing. Only in the last six segments of life did the masses of people see the printed word. Only in the last four has it become possible to measure time with any degree of accuracy. It's only in the last two that someone, somewhere, has used an electric motor. And the vast majority of all material goods that we use in Everyday life at present, were invented during the present, 800th segment of life.
And the words of Toffler, written several decades ago, have a real reflection in modern society. Remember, a decade ago we had no idea, for example, about DVD players, and today we cannot imagine our existence without household items that are so necessary for us. And there can be many such examples in our life.
Also in this work, Toffler for the first time introduces the concept of changing waves-types of society. The first wave is the result of an agrarian revolution that changed the culture of hunters and gatherers. The second wave is the result of the industrial revolution, which is characterized by a nuclear family, an assembly line education system, and corporatism. The third wave is the result of the intellectual revolution, that is, a post-industrial society in which there is a huge variety of subcultures and lifestyles. information can replace great amount material resources and becomes the main material for the workers, who are freely associated in associations. The third wave can be called otherwise by a term that is now used quite often already in everyday language - “information society”.
We have become addicted to information as something we need every day. Newspapers, magazines and, of course, the Internet, which has become a second reality, have become a necessity, replacing many of them. real life. At the same time, we can observe a decrease, and sometimes a complete absence of filtering barriers when receiving this or that information. Without even thinking about it, we begin to take on faith everything that we hear and see on the screens of computers and televisions. Our society has become hostage to the information it receives. It doesn’t matter to a person what information he receives, but it is important that he receives it without interruption, whether it be news about the personal life of some figure, or news about the outbreak of hostilities in some remote African country.
In the work “Future Shock”, I consider the main drawback to be cast so various parts the life of society, that the reduction of such phenomena as the change of education systems, family disintegration, decentralization political power, changes in lifestyles, an abundance of subcultures - cannot be reduced to one process. In my opinion, there may be reasons large quantity and they cannot all be the result of the same process. There is a feeling that Toffler associates any phenomenon that is difficult to explain with its novelty in society, and not with a natural pattern. But at the same time, one cannot fail to note the merits of Alvin Toffler in the ideas and concepts expressed by him.
Conclusion.
The changes taking place in our society are its integral part and natural process. Toffler talks about the inevitability of future shock, but nevertheless, in my opinion, he exaggerates its significance. Yes, society at a certain stage had to face the inevitability of change. But generations have succeeded each other and today we see another generation of people who have adapted to the existing realities. A four-year-old child perceives computer technologies not as something unknown, but as an everyday thing, without attaching such importance to it as several decades ago.
Toffler's predictions turned out to be largely right, but he did not take into account the fact that no matter what technologies a person encounters, such things as love, honor, greed, and hope will always exist in his life. Times are changing, technology is improving, the pace of life is accelerating, but the human desire to live and the ability to adapt will always accept change as something natural and logical.
Bibliography.
1. Toffler, Alvin. Shock of the future. M.: AST, 2001. - 560 s
2. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Toffler,_Alvin
3. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Futurochok
4. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-industrial_society
He published it at the peak of the popularity of psychoanalysis, when Americans, stressed by the new pace of life, were already besieging psychiatrists' offices with might and main. Observing the trends of the middle of the last century, Toffler made a prophetic assumption. It consists in the fact that at some point people stop keeping up with the ever-condensing flow of change. This causes them a kind of "decompensation" - a complex of psychological problems and diseases, which the author painted very colorfully in the book.
The term "future shock" was first used by Toffler in 1965 in his article in Horizon magazine.
Toffler's Futuroshock is the stress and disorientation that occurs when people undergo too many changes in too little time.
Like it or not, it is not easy to say for sure. On the one hand, we do have problems with the inability to control everyday stress. But wasn't life half a hundred years ago harder in this sense - in conditions of less advanced medicine, in the absence of mobile phones(which freed us a monstrous amount of personal time, the lack of which leads to the main stress in the conditions of civilization), as well as other useful things - like the ability to watch online movies in 4K or order food and coupons to the doctor, bypassing trips and hanging around in lines? And weren’t the complexities generated by that “gadget-free” reality in themselves a source of everyday stress, from which we are now (thanks to technology) relieved?
Pro
In general, Toffler guessed a lot of interesting things. Futuroshock predicts a wide spread of families consisting of a mother and one child, as well as a crisis of the family as an institution in general, that is, exactly what we are seeing at the beginning of the 21st century in civilized societies of the Western type (to which, no doubt, culturally and demographically.
He predicted some new state of humanity, which he defined as a "civilization of disposable cups."
It was he who predicted such a thing as “programmed wear”. Toffler even has a special term for this phenomenon - transition. By it, he understood the transience of relationships with goods, people, organizations, information and place. People change their preferences more often, they start buying goods not because the old ones are out of service, but because they are tired of them. They often move (“new nomads”), and in contacts with each other they use a “modular” approach, when they are not interested in the whole person, but in some part of him, some one side of his life (religion, profession, hobby) , and all others are not affected at all.
Perhaps in small details Toffler saw the future much more accurately than Sir Arthur Clarke. Here, for example, is a passage in which it is easy to recognize modern endoscopic surgery.
A patient in a very serious condition was recently admitted to the main Midwest hospital in the middle of the night. He hiccupped heavily 60 times a minute. The patient turned out to be the owner of the pacemaker. The resident realized what had happened: the pacemaker wire, instead of stimulating the heart, had become loose and stuck in the diaphragm. These electrical shocks were the cause of the hiccups. Working quickly, the resident inserted the needle into chest patient near the pacemaker, hooked the wire with a needle and grounded it. The hiccups stopped, allowing the doctors to move the misplaced wire. Anticipation of tomorrow's medicine?
- "Future Shock"
He predicted the widespread use of what we know today as "role-playing games" ( role playing game, RPG) and "virtual reality".
Fake environment, which will offer the consumer adventure, danger and other pleasures without risk to real life.
- "Future Shock"
Are you familiar with this TV project?
Life on a desert island of dozens of men and women...
- "Future Shock"
He was the forerunner of modern transhumanism, since already in the 60s he spoke about the future fusion of man with machines, as well as about the fundamental transition (“Great Boundary”) that will separate the era we are just entering from all previous human history.
They justify it like this. The whole history can be packed into 800 lifetimes of one person (an average of 62 years for each). Of these, 650 people spent with stone tools, sitting in caves. In the last 70 mankind has been using writing. Only the last 6 generations see the printed word, and two generations know the electric motor.
But look at the last 800th generation: during his lifetime, man has invented a great many different things - much more than in all of his previous history.
90% of all scientists who have ever lived are living now. Half of all the energy expended by mankind has been used up in the last 100 years. This is the peak of human activity, and we are now living in it. This transition to a post-industrial society (also a Toffler term) is as significant in the history of our species as the transition from gathering and hunting to farming and pastoralism.
Toffler predicted more things than Arthur C. Clarke, and perhaps surpassed Jules Verne.
In fact, invented American sociologist the term "future shock" means not only an individual reaction to accelerating changes, but also a changing attitude of society towards them. Here, modern neo-traditionalist movements immediately come to mind, the fashion for which was fairly whipped up by the zero years. We are all witnesses of an amazing phenomenon when ordinary people who have received some kind of higher education, under the influence of this fashion, they are promoting on the Internet (!) the ideas of a return to blouses and kokoshniks.
It is not difficult to understand such a reaction if we consider it through the prism of Toffler's concept - as a kind of protection against time, over which people are gradually losing control. From time to which they no longer have time to adapt.
Contra
We live in a time when fantasy has become reality. Cell phones, robotic limbs from " star wars”, artificial retinas and functioning artificial eyes, even hoverboards from the third “Back to the Future” - all this is already a reality, not a futuristic concept.
And here is the same hoverboard from Lexus.
And what is surprising here is not our movement in time from a technology-poor yesterday to a super-advanced tomorrow. Our calm is amazing. We take all this absolutely mind-blowing stuff for granted.
And this may mean, for example, that Toffler made a mistake in something important.
The author of these lines belongs to a generation that remembers the times when the pinnacle of technical thought was the Tamagotchi and the Wolf Catches Eggs toy, and acquaintance with a personal computer consisted of staring at such a thing as the KUVT Corvette during training hours (touching was allowed only after a multi-level instructions).
In younger people, these processes occur more naturally. The huge path that humanity has passed over these 25 years seems to them to be smoother. Most of those born in the 90s came to a world where there were already such things as the Internet and cellular. They don't seem like an achievement to them. Like the Windows operating system, it does not seem like a miracle to those who have never seen toys written for MS-DOS (the whole universe, by the way).
This is what the KUVT Corvette looked like
One of the most important sources of stress is the lack of information. So is it really possible that today, having access to the Google search line and “double GIS”, we are more stressed than when the necessary non-trivial information was available only through face-to-face / telephone contact with a specialist (and for money), and this specialist had to be found beforehand? To me, this is not entirely true.
Civilization is no doubt accelerating, adding to us nervous tension. And in this Toffler was absolutely right.
But first, it also eliminates, or significantly weakens those sources of stress that caused the most trouble in a less technologically advanced civilization. Secondly, society itself is becoming more tolerant of change.
The rate of innovation that a person is willing to accept increases with each generation.
At the same time, the intensity of reaction to change varies from generation to generation. Today's 40-year-olds are much more inclined to admire the path passed by civilization at the turn of the century (even just fix it in their minds) than the current 25-year-olds.
There is a feeling that the generation of 15-year-olds, who in principle did not know another society, will be even less sensitive to change than we are.
Generation Compression
A revolution has taken place before our very eyes. We have witnessed how the paper carrier of information, which seemed unshakable literally five to ten years ago, has almost completely degraded, turning into either a gift product or the “Internet for pensioners”. We live in a world of electronic media, generations of which replace each other in a matter of years.
Under these conditions, entire industries like glossy journalism are falling into disrepair, losing relevance before yesterday's freshman manages to get a diploma.
Don't you think that against the background of these events quite clearly predicted by Toffler and other futurologists, we are witnessing a new phenomenon - a kind of "generational compression"?
Literally six or seven years ago, graduates of specialists - that part of them that successfully got a job and yesterday still looked perfectly adapted - today already looks lost in the labor market. As soon as they start looking for a job, they discover that the profession that they considered mastered yesterday no longer exists in their usual form.
Gadgets become morally obsolete in a period of 3 to 7 years. This applies to all devices that we use - from cars and microwaves to phones and laptops. Mankind clings to the last islands of the familiar - to operating system XP, for the usual wall design in VKontakte. Companies continue to drag their customers forward, often simply cutting off their escape routes by force.
How quickly the capacity of storage media changes has not surprised us for a long time. We simply do not notice this process.
In 2012, we heard about the hormone irisin, which mimics exercise in mice, causing them to lose weight quickly. Subsequently, a similar effect of this protein was found in humans, although there is recent evidence that casts the results of these studies into doubt (it seems that in our species the irisin gene is “silent” due to a mutation). In 2015, a fundamentally new substance with a similar effect in humans was synthesized.
This allows us to predict the approach of the time when we will be able to manage our body weight without exhausting loads in gym. Imagine how the entire fitness industry could lose millions of customers (I'm not saying that it will disappear completely) if a safe and inexpensive drug that can burn fat / prevent type 2 diabetes appears in the pharmacy. And there, you see, they will come up with something that will finally send flowering fitness centers after 5 and 3-inch disk drives, magnetic tape cassettes and CDs. Is this not a revolution?
Big changes are happening smoothly enough that we hardly notice them, but still fast enough to provide humanity with an explosive transition to some new stage of development in the 21st century. At this stage, our attitude to information, the means of its transmission and storage, as well as to communication between people, changes qualitatively.
The attitude towards our bodies and the clothes we wear is changing. Even the perception of time is changing.
In my poor internet-deprived childhood, the week was long and extremely eventful. At 35, I experience the weeks as even and gradually accelerating clicks of the weekend. The weeks are shrinking. This is primarily a feature of the aging of the human brain, of course. With age, we all subjectively feel it in about the same way. But something similar is happening to society as a whole. Every year is more and more saturated important events that change our reality. They have not yet accelerated to such an extent that we stop registering them with consciousness and fall into decompensation, but we are already beginning to notice something similar to the diseases described by Toffler in ourselves and in others. Society is psychologically aging, and its internal time is gradually accelerating.
Read books, sir.
future shock
GOD OF AMAZING TRANSFORMATIONS
You wake up in the morning and find that the world, which for many years was perceived as the background of your life, has changed. Everything you are used to becomes completely different. And in record time, literally every second. For example, last year this day was considered a great holiday. You sat at the screen and watched the demo. Friends called you, postmen brought postcards. This day is still considered a holiday. However, no one calls, no congratulations. There is only one form left. Why is she? You walk into a store and are amazed at how much the prices have gone up.
No, you can get used to the fact that this day is not a holiday at all, but such prices ... Who could have foreseen that a bunch of onions ... Or, let's say, a jar of vaseline ... It's probably time to put up with it, because there are still many trials ahead. But the soul does not keep up with the changes. The world seems hostile and frightening incomprehensible.
A friend calls and says that a pigalina from their class has become a currency prostitute. You discuss this issue for a long time and even manage to ask how the health of her well-bred mother is. And the one who sat at the same desk with a pigali and dreamed of becoming an academician, now, it turns out, walks in a luxurious leather jacket. He works as a janitor...
All representations have shifted. An acquaintance called a friend who entered graduate school a fool. Underpass deafens you with accordion sounds. You slow down. A few months ago, you saw this musician on the cover of a fashionable illustrated magazine... In the evening, a television presenter appears on the screen and comments on the collapse of the ruble. The miners block the railway lines. Teachers and professors are looking for work in commercial stalls. They say that a wolf can be struck by a heart attack if the space in which he lives suddenly turns out to be narrowed. And what happens to a person who suddenly finds out that he cannot appear in another area where people of a different nationality live? All values have changed at once. The teacher sometimes does not know what he should now tell the children - times have changed. The scientist is amazed that he has lost his social status. A worker of a recently promising enterprise suddenly turned out to be unemployed. The Red Director, thrice decorated, still hopes that everything will return to its previous course. However, there is less and less hope...
The usual way of life is rapidly collapsing, things that until recently constituted the meaning of our existence are becoming a thing of the past. Orientations change. A specialist in atheism wears an Orthodox beard. The teacher of scientific communism directs the cooperative. Shrines are falling down. A girl who has joined a firm unexpectedly receives an invitation to sleep with her boss. "For what reason?" she asks. They answer her: “Are you crazy?” Political domestic feuds turn into bloody massacres. Man remains alone in the face of the impending unknown.
When fragments of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock appeared in our magazines in the early 1970s, we read those pages like a fantasy novel. To us, living in the rhythm of stagnation, in archaic social structures, all this seemed far away, although it made us surrender to the waves of the imagination. Almost thirty years have passed since the book of the American journalist and sociologist was published.
Do we need it today, on the threshold of the new millennium? Will it find a response in the hearts of Russians? Finally, did the fashion forecaster's predictions come true? After all, the author himself admitted that his work in the stream of rapid transformations would also be outdated. Toffler's book is the product of a vibrant social imagination. Although the author constantly refers to scientific publications, statistics, everyday examples, his work reveals in many ways the world of fantasy, productive looking into the future.
Toffler wrote that humanity is capturing a previously unknown psychological state, which in its effect can be equated to a disease. This disease also has its own name “futuroshok” - “shock of the future”. Mankind can die not because the storerooms of the earth are exhausted, atomic energy gets out of control, or tormented nature perishes. People will die out due to the fact that they cannot withstand psychological stress.
Futurochok is characterized by a sudden, overwhelming loss of a sense of reality, the ability to navigate life, caused by fear of the near future. Even before the beginning of the XXI century. millions of ordinary physically healthy and mentally normal people will suddenly come face to face with the future. Will they be able to adapt to the ever-increasing pressure of events, knowledge, science, technology, various kinds of information? Will this lead to serious social and psychological consequences? Is humanity only now faced with these problems? Is it only in our country that a person is pushed out of his usual niche? Medieval man saw the future as a mysterious and dark force. He perceived even a joyful day with anxiety: what if these pleasures turn into executions at the Last Judgment. Wars, epidemics, famine were perceived as signs of the impending end of the world. The frescoes of temples depicting episodes of the Last Judgment made the hearts of believers tremble at the mere thought of what awaits them on the other side of life, in the afterlife.
Alvin Toffler. Future Shock (Futuroshock)
Futuroshock (futurshok) is a shock of the future, a psychological reaction of a person or society to rapid and radical changes in his environment, caused by the acceleration of the pace of technological and social progress. The term was introduced by the sociologist and futurologist Alvin Toffler in the work of the same name, published in 1970.
But the phenomenon described by Toffler, perhaps, should be called a present shock, since the shock is caused by a person's collision with changes that have already occurred in the environment.
The shock of the present is caused by a discrepancy between reality and the picture of reality in the mind (the person did not have time to adapt). Such a discrepancy is generated by changes, especially by rapid, increasing pressure of events, the flow of knowledge, science, technology, and various kinds of information.
By the end of the 20th century, in connection with the development of futurology and transhumanism, a holistic vision of the future began to emerge, stretching so far forward as never before. Society and man faced the task of adapting not only to the ongoing changes, but also to the expected ones. That is, the required rate of adaptation has become even higher than in the time of Toffler.
Society as a whole is aware of its prospects, but some people have learned more about the prospects of technological development than others. An encounter (for example, in the media) with more advanced technology than is already known to man causes future shock.
The book of the American futurologist and publicist E. Toffler "Future Shock" is undoubtedly the bestseller of the last decades. The author draws attention to the unheard-of pace that is characteristic of modern cultural and political changes. Mankind may die not because of an ecological catastrophe, a nuclear reaction or depletion of resources. The shock that people experience leads to psychological numbness, to the very real danger that lies in wait for humanity. This is the main threat. We must recognize it and, if possible, eliminate it. The author hopes that the measures he proposed will help a person survive in the new reality and prevent future shock.
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about what happens to people when change hits them. It's about how we adapt - or don't adapt - to the future.
Much has been written about the future. Most of the books that describe the world to come have a hard, metallic tone. These pages are dedicated to the "soft" or human side tomorrow. In addition, they talk about how we are moving towards tomorrow. Forecast deals with common, everyday questions - what foods we buy and what we refuse, what places we leave, what associations we join, what people pass through our lives without lingering near us. The future of friendship and family life is explored. Weird new subcultures and lifestyles are explored, as well as a host of other topics, from politics and sports fields to skydiving and sex.
What unites it all, both in the book and in life, is a roaring tide of change, a tide so powerful at this time that it is overturning institutions, producing a shift in values, and drying up our roots. Change is the process by which the future enters our lives, and it is important to look at it carefully, not just from a grand historical perspective, but also from the perspective of the living, breathing individuals who experience it. The acceleration of change in our time is itself an elemental force. This power has personal and psychological as well as sociological implications. In the following chapters, these effects of acceleration are systematically examined for the first time. The book convincingly, I hope, proves that if a person does not quickly learn to control the rate of change in their personal affairs, as well as in society as a whole, we are doomed to a massive adaptive breakdown.
In 1965, in an article in Horizon, I first used the term "future shock" to describe the devastating stress and disorientation that causes individuals to change too much in too short a time. Captivated by this idea, I spent the next five years visiting universities, research centers, laboratories, and government agencies, reading countless articles and research papers, and talking to literally hundreds of experts on all aspects of change, practice, and the future. Nobel laureates, hippies, psychiatrists, doctors, businessmen, professional futurists, philosophers, and educators have voiced their concerns about change, their anxiety about adaptation, their fears about the future. From this experience I drew two disturbing conclusions. First, it became clear that future shock is not a distant potential danger, but a real disease from which an increasing number of people are already suffering. This psychobiological state can be described in medical and psychiatric terms. This is the disease of change.
Second, I was gradually dismayed by how little adaptability is actually known, both by those who are calling for change and creating large-scale change in our society, and by those who are supposedly preparing us to deal with that change. Serious intellectuals speak boldly of "education for change" or "preparing people for the future." But we don't really know anything about how to do it. In the most rapidly changing environment that man has ever lived in, we are left in a pitiful ignorance of how a person copes with problems.
Our psychologists and politicians are also puzzled by the apparently irrational resistance to change that certain individuals and groups exhibit. The head of a corporation who wants to reorganize a department, a teacher who wants to implement a new method, a mayor who wants to peacefully racially integrate his city, all face this muted opposition at one time or another. However, we know little about its sources. Besides, why do some people yearn for, even yearn for, change, doing everything in their power to create it, while others run from it? Not only did I not find ready-made answers to these questions, but I found that we do not even have an adequate theory of adaptation, without which it is extremely unlikely that we will ever find answers.
The purpose of this book, then, is to help us come to terms with the future—to help us deal more effectively with both personal and social change by deepening our understanding of how people respond to it. To this end, it puts forward a new general theory of adaptation.
It also draws attention to an important though often overlooked difference. Almost invariably, research on the impacts of change focuses on where change takes us rather than the speed of that journey. What I am trying to show in this book is that the speed of change matters quite differently, and sometimes more important, than the direction of change. No attempt to understand adaptability can succeed unless this fact is recognized. Any attempt to define the "content" of change must include the effects of the pace itself as part of that content.
William Ogburn, with his famous theory of cultural lag, showed how social stress arises from the unequal rate of change occurring in different sectors of society. The concept of future shock - and the theory of adaptation that derives from it - clearly suggests that there must be a balance not only between the rate of change in different sectors, but between the rate of environmental change and the limited rate of human response. For the cause of the shock of the future is the growing gap between them.
However, the purpose of the book is not only to present the theory. It also aims to demonstrate the method. Previously, people studied the past in order to shed light on the present. I turned the mirror of time, confident that a clear image of the future would help us better understand the present. Today it is increasingly difficult for us to be aware of our personal and social problems without using the future as an intellectual tool. In the chapters that follow, I deliberately use this tool to show what it can do.
Finally, it is no less important that the author seeks to imperceptibly, but significantly change the mind of the reader. Why this is necessary will become clear from what follows. In order to successfully cope with rapid change, most of us will need to transform our attitude towards the future, to understand the role that it plays in the present. The purpose of this book is to change the understanding of the future. If the reader, having finished reading this book, begins to think, reflect or try to anticipate future events, then the author has coped with his task.
Here it is appropriate to make a few reservations. Today the facts are fleeting. Every seasoned reporter knows what it's like to work on a rapidly disappearing situation that changes form and meaning before the words are written down. Today the whole world is a rapidly disappearing situation. It is therefore inevitable that in a book that has been in the making for several years, a number of facts will be out of date by the time of publication. During this time, professors who taught at university A began to lecture at university B. Politicians who held the views of X managed to move to position Y.
While a conscientious effort was made at the time of writing to update Future Shock, some of the facts cited are no doubt already out of date. (This, of course, can be said of many books, although the authors avoid the topic.) The decay of the data is of particular importance here: it confirms the rapidity of change contained in this book. It's getting harder and harder for writers to keep up with reality. We have not yet learned to conceive, explore, write, and publish in “real time.” Readers should therefore pay more attention to main theme and not on the details.
Another caveat concerns the verb "will". No serious futurologist is engaged in "predictions". They are left to television oracles and newspaper astrologers. No person, even slightly familiar with the complexities of forecasting, claims to have absolute knowledge of tomorrow. As one delightfully ironic saying attributed to the Chinese goes, "Prophesying is exceedingly difficult - especially in regard to the future."
This means that any statement about the future must be thoroughly accompanied by a chain of reservations - various “if”, “however”, “on the other hand”, etc. ". I have taken the liberty of speaking firmly, without hesitation, in the hope that the intelligent reader will understand the stylistic problem. Next to the word "will" is always meant the words "maybe" or "in my opinion." Similarly, all dates relating to future events must be accepted with reservation. The inability to speak accurately and confidently about the future is no excuse for silence. "Exact data", of course, must always be taken into account. But if they don't, the responsible writer - even the scientist - has both the right and the duty to rely on other kinds of evidence, including the impressions, stories, and opinions of well-informed people. I did it all the time and I don't regret it.
When exploring the future, it is more important to have imagination and insight than to be one hundred percent "right." Theories don't have to be "true" to be extremely useful. Even a mistake can serve its purpose. The maps of the world drawn by medieval cartographers were so hopelessly inaccurate, so full of factual errors, that they elicit indulgent smiles now that almost the entire surface of the earth has been mapped. Nevertheless, without them, the great explorers would never have discovered the New World. And today's improved, refined maps could not have been created until people working with the limited available data put their bold ideas on paper about worlds they've never seen. We future explorers work in the spirit of the old cartographers: the concept of future shock and the theory of adaptability limits are presented here not as the final word, but as the first approximation of new realities filled with danger and promise, created by the power of acceleration.
