A paper presented by post graduate students from the Department of Arts and Social Sciences (Language Education), University of Ibadan, Nigeria. this paper examines the phenomenon future shock by Alvin Toffler

1. Lecturer
Prof. Babarinde

2. The notion of future shock attracted
widespread attention in the early 1970s but
never became intellectually respectable. What
it did do was to help express widely felt
concerns about the nature of ‘changing times
‘. For many people the revolution and changes
of the early 20th century overturned their
sense of “normalcy” of a predictable and
settled social order. Instability became the
norm in many

3. domains of social and economic life.
Writing during the late 1960s Toffler
summarized this thesis thus:
in three short decades between now
and the turn of the next millennium,
millions of psychologically normal
people will experience an abrupt
collision with the future. Affluent,
educated citizens of the world’s

4. collision with the future. Affluent,
educated citizens of the world’s richest
and most technically advanced nations,
they will fall victim to tomorrow’s most
menacing malady: the disease of change.

5. ABOUT THE BOOK
The author coined this term in an article
in Horizon in 1965, to describe the shattering
stress and disorientation that are induce in
individual by subjecting them to too much
change in too short a time.
Massive changes result in stress and
disorientation, especially when changes take
place in a short period of time.

6. a. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation
brought on by the premature arrival of the future.
b. Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly
accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the
superimposition of a new culture on an old one.
c. It is culture shock in one's own society. But its impact is far
worse.

7. NOTABLE IDEAS FROM FUTURE SHOCK
a. SUPER-INDUSTRIALIZATION ERA
People are running blindly in the overpowering thrust of
accelerating change, thereby leaving everything behind to
which they were earlier attached.
b. NOVELTY
Novelty indicates too many new things to deal with

8. C. TECHNOLOGICAL ENGINE
Behind every mode of economic changes lies the
great, growling engine of change regarded as
technology. This is not to say that technology is the
only source of change in society, however technology
is indisputably a major force behind the accelerative
thrust.
D. CHANGE AND KNOWLEDGE
The rate at which man has been storing up useful
knowledge about himself and the universe has been
spiraling upward for 10,000 years. The rate took a sharp
upward leap with the invention of writing.

9. E. ACCELERATIVE THRUST
Many of us have a vague "feeling" that things
are moving faster. Doctors and executives alike
complain that they cannot keep up with the
latest developments in their fields.
F. TIME AND CHANGE
There is, after all, no absolute way to measure
change. In the awesome complexity of the
universe, even within any given society, a
virtually infinite number of streams of change
occur simultaneously.

10. g. DIVERSITY
Lots of things or too many things or options to
choose from.
h. PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS
Author then describes the physical and psychological
dimensions of adaptability. Author expresses future
shock as both physical and psychological distress
that arises from an overload of the human
organism’s physical adaptively systems and its
decision making processes.

11. H. CULTURE SHOCK
the effect of immersion in a strange culture
has on the unprepared visitor. E.g. where a
“Yes” means “No”, where fixed price is
negotiable.
I. HOW TO SURVIVE
By consciously accessing our own life style,
building personal stability zone, situational
grouping and half way houses to adjust in the
super industrialization.

12. 21ST CENTURY
1. WE ARE NOW IN THE 21ST CENTURY GENERATION.
2. THE BEGINNING OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY.
THINGS ARE CHANGE!
FROM OLD TO NEW..
FROM SLOW TO FAST..
FROM DIFFICULT TO AN EASIER WAY…
TECHNOLOGY GIVES US WAY FOR THE BETTER
FUTURE!

15. 1. Life is filled with future shock all the time. He who do not wake
to the call of future has to suffer so much he becomes EXTINCT
in the eyes of the forward people. CROWD NO MORE WATCHES YOU.
Future shock I read 30 years back and I was shocked beyond because
I was 31 years felt so much exhausted. I felt my time is over because
the revelation of future in life was beyond what I could believe.
2. I DID NOT KNOW WHAT IS MEANT BY COMPUER. I had heard
computer which housed so many moving parts and just could not
believe the holes meant computer, it was so fearful at that time and I
never liked on it.
COMMENTS/REACTION

16. Toffler, A. quoted in Cross, N. (ed) Man Made Futures,
London, Hutchinson, 1974. Bezold, C. (ed) Anticipatory
Democracy, Vintage, 1978.
Slaughter, R. Futures Studies: From Individual to Social
Capacity, Futures, 28, 8, 1996, p 751-762.
Toffler, A. (ed) Learning for Tomorrow, Vintage, 1974.
REFERENCES