Future Shock

In Three Short Decades between now and turn of the next millennium, million of psychologically normal people will experience an abrupt collision with the future. Affluent, educated citizens of the world's richest and most technically advanced nations, they will fall victim to tomorow's most menacing malady: the disease of change. Unable to keep up with the supercharged pace of change, brought to the edge of breakdown by incessant demands to adapt to adapt to novelty, many will plunge into future shock. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.

Future shock is more than an arresting phrase. It may prove to be the most obstinate and debilitating social problem of the furture. Its symptoms range from confusion, anxiety and hostility to helpful authority, to physical illness, seemingly senseless, violence and self-destructive apathy. Future-shock victims manifest erratic swings in interest and life style, followed by a panicky sense that events are slipping out of their control and, later, a desperate effort to "crawl into their shells" through social, intellectual and emotional withdrawal. They feel continuously harassed and attempt to reduce the number of changes with which they must cope, the number of decisions they must make. The ultimate casualties of future shock terminate by cutting off the outside world entirely--dropping out, spiraling deeper and deeper into disengagement.

In the decades immediately ahead, we face a torrent of change--in our jobs, our families, our sexual standards, our art, our politics, our values. This means that millions of us, ill prepared by either past experience or education, will be forced to make repeated, often painfull adaptations. Some of us will be simply unable to function in this social flux and, unless we learn to treat--or prevent--future shock, we shall witness an intensification of the mass neurosis, irrationalism and violence already tearing at today's change-Wracked society.

The quickest way to grasp the idea of future shock is to begin with a parallel term--culture shock--that has begun to creep from anthropology texts into the popular language. Culture shock is the queasy physical and mental state produced in an unprepared person who is suddenly immersed in an alien culture. Peace Corps Volunteers suffer form it in Ethiopia or Ecuador. Marco Polo probably suffered from it in Cathay. Culture shock is what happens when a traveler suddenly finds himself surrounded by newness, cut off from meaning--when, because of a shift of culture, a yes may mean no, when to slap a man's back in friendly camaraderie may be to offer a mortal insult, when laughter may signify not joy but fury. Culture shock is the bewilderment and distress--sometimes culminating in blind fury or bone-deep apathy--triggered by the removal of the familiar psychological cues on which all of us must depend for survival.

The culture-shock phenomenon accounts for much of the frustration and disorientation that plague Americans in their dealings with other societies. It causes a breakdown in communication, a misreading of reality, an inability to cope. yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with future shock. This malady will not be found in Index Medicus or in any listing of psychological abnormalities. Yet, unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly incompetent to deal rationally with thier environments. A product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society, future shock arises from the superimposition of new culture on an old one. It culture shock in one's own society. But its impact is far worse. For most Peace Corps men--in fact, most travelers--have the comforting knowledge that culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not.

Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a wholly novel set of cues to react to familiar social landscape and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself rife with change, and if, moreover, its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be even further intensified. Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to himself and others. Now, imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation--including its weakest, least intelligent and most irrational members--suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.

This is the prospect man faces. For a new society--superindustrial, fast-paced, fragmented, filled with bizarre styles, customs and choices--is erupting in our midst. An alien culture is swiftly displacing the one in which most of us have our roots. Change is avalanching upon our heads, and most people are unprepared to cope with it. Man is not infinitely adaptable, no matter what the romantics or mystics may say. We are biological organisms with only so much resilience, only a limited ability to absorb the physiological and mental punishment inherent in change. In the past, when pace of change was leisurely, the substitution of one culture for another tended to stretch over centuries. Today, We experience a millennium of change in a few brief decades. Time is compressed. This means that the emergent superindustrial society will, itself, be swept away in the tidal wave of change--even before we have learned to cope adequately with it. In certain quarters, the rate of changes is already blinding. Yet there are powerful reasons to believe that we are only at beginning of the accelerative curve. History itself is speeding up.

This startling statement can be illustrated in a number of ways. It has been observed, for example, that if the past 50,000 years of man's existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62 years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves. Only during the past 70 lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another -- as writing made it possible to do. Only during the past six lifetimes have masses of men ever seen a printed word. Only during the past four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the past two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

Painting with the broadest of brusch strokes, biologist Sir Julian Huxley informs us that "The tempo of human evolution during recorded history is at lest 100,000 times as rapid as that of prehuman evolution." Inventions or improvements of a magnitude that took perhaps 50,000 years to accomplish during the early Paleolithic era were, he says, "run through in a mere millennium toward its close; and with advent of settled civilization, the unit of change soon became reduced to the century." The rate of change, accelerating throughout the past 5000 years, has become, in his words, "particularly noticeable during the past 300 years. "Indeed, says social psychologist Warren Bennis, the throttle has been pushed so far forward in recent years that "No exagggeration, no hyperbole, no outrage can realistically describe the extent and pace of change...In fact, only the exaggeration appear to be true."

What changes justify such supercharged language? Let us look at few -- changes in the process by which man forms cities, for example. We are now undergoing the most extensive and rapid urbanization the world has ever seen. In 1850, only four cities on the face of the earth had a population of 1,000,000 or more. By 1900, the number had increased to 19. But by 1960, there were 141; and today, world urban population is rocketing upward at a rate of 6.5 percent per year, according to Egbert de vries and J.T. Thijsse of the Institute of social studies in The Hague. This single stark statistic means a doubling of the earth's urban population within II years.

One way to grasp the meaning of change on so phenomenal a scale is to imagine what would happen if all existing cities, instead of expanding, retained their present size. If this were were so, in order to accommodate the new urban millions, we would have to build a duplicate city for each of the hundreds that already dot the globe. A new Tokyo, a new Hamburg, a new Rome and Rangoon -- and all within II years. This explains why Buckminster Fuller has proposed building whole cities in shipyards and towing them to coastal moorings adjacent to big cities, It explains why builders talk more about "instant" architecture--an "instant factory" to spring up here, and "instant campus " to be constucted there. It is why French urban are sketching subterranean cities -- stores, museums, warehouses and factories to be built under the earth--and why a Japanese architect has blueprinted a city to be built on stilts out over the ocean.

The same accelerative tendency is instantly apparent in man's consumption of energy. Dr. Homi Bhabha, the late indian atomic scientist, once analyzes this trend. "To illustrate," he said, "let us use the letter Q to stand for the energy derived from burning some 33 billion tons of coal. In the 181/2 centuries after Christ, the total energy consumed averaged less than 1/2 Q per century. But by 1850, the rate had risen to one Q per century. Today, the rate is about 10 Q per century." This means roughly speaking, that half of all the energy consumed by man in the past 2000 year has been consumed in the past 100.

Also dramatically evident is the acceleration of economic growth in the nations racing toward superindustrialism. Despite the fact that they start from a large industrial base, the annual percentage increase in production in these countries are formidable. And the rate of increase is itself increasing. In France, for example, in the 29 years between 1910 and the outbreak of World War Two, industrial production rose only five percent. yet between 1948 and 1965, in only 17 years, it increased by more than 220 percent. Today, growth rates of from 5 to 10 percent per year are not uncommon among the most industrialized nations. Thus, for the 21 countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and development--by and large, the "have"nations--the average annual rate of increase in gross national product in the years 1960-1968 ran between 4.5 and 5 percent. The U.S., despite a series of ups and downs, grew at a rate of 4.5 percent, and Japan led the rest with annual increases averaging 9.8 percent.

What such numbers imply is nothing less revolutionary than a doubling of the total output of goods and services in the advanced societies about every 15 years--and the doubling times are shrinking. this means that the child reaching his teens in any of these societies is literally surrounded by twice as much of everything newly man-made as his parents were at the time he was an infant. It means that by the time today's teenager reaches the age of 30, perhaps earlier, a second doubling will have occurred. Within a 70-year lifetime, perhaps five such doublings will take place--meaning, since the increases are compounded, that by the time the individual reaches old age, the society around him will be producing 32 times as much as when he was born. Such changes in the ratio between old new have, as we shall show, an electric impact on the habits, beliefs and self-images of millions. Never in history has this ratio been transformed so radically in so brief a flick of time.

Behind such prodingious economic facts lies that great, growling engine of change--technology is the only source of change in society. Social upheavals can be touched off by a change in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, by alterations in climate, by changes in fertility and many other factors. yet technology is indisputably a major force behind the accelerative thrust. To most people, the term technology conjures up images of smoky steel mills and clanking machines. Perhaps the classic symbol of technology is still the assembly line created by Henry Ford half a century ago and transformed into a potent social icon by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. This symbol, however, has always been inadequate--indeed, misleading--for technology has always been more than factories and machines. The invention of the horse collar in the Middle Ages led to major changes in agricultural methods and was as much a technological advance as the invention of the Bessemer furnace centuries later. Moreover, technology includes techniques as well as necessary to apply them. It includes ways to make chemical reactions occur, ways to breed fish, plant forests, light theaters, count votes or teach history.

The old symbols of technology are even more misleading today, when the most advanced technological processes are carried out far from assembly lines or open hearths. Indeed, in eletronics, in space technology, in most of the new industries, relative silence and clean surroundings are characteristic--sometimes even essential. And the assembly line--the organization of armies of men to carry out simple repetitive function--is an anachronism. It is time for our symbols of technology to change--to catch up with the fantasic changes in technology itself.

This acceleration is graphically dramatized by a thumbnail account of the progress in transportation account of the progress in transporation. It has been pointed out, for example, that in 6000 B.C., the fastest transporation over long distances available to man was the camel caravan, averaging eight miles per hour, It was not until about 3000 B.C., When the chariot was invented, that the maximum speed was raised to roughly 20 mph. So impressive was this invention, So impressive was this invention, so difficult was it to exceed this speed limit that nearly 5000 years later, when the first mail coach began operation in England in 1784, it averaged a mere ten mph. The first steam locomotive, introduced in 1825, could muster a top speed of only 13 mph, and the great sailing ships of the time labored along at less than half that speed. It was probably not until the 1880s that man, with the help of a more advanced steam locomotive, managed to reach a speed of 100 mph. It took the human race millions of years to attain that record. It took only 50 years, however, to quadruple the limit; so that by 1931, airborne man cracking the 400-mph line. It took a mere 20 years to double the limit again. And by the 1960s, rocket planes approached speeds of 4000 mph and men in space capsules were curcling the earht at 18,000 mph. Platted on a graph, the line representin progress in the past generation would leap vertically off the page.

Whether we examine distances traveled, altituldes reached, minerals mined or explosive power harnessed, the same accelerative trend is obvious. the pattern, here and in a thousand other statistical series, is absolutely clear and unmistakable. Millenniums or centuries go by, and then, in our own times, a sudden bursting of the limits, a fantastic spurt forward. The reason for this is that technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible, as we can see if we look for a moment at the process of innovation. Technological innovation consists of three stages, linked together into a self-reinforcing cycle. First, there is the creative, feasible idea. Second, its practical application. Third, its diffusion through society. The process is completed, the loop closed, when the diffusion of technology embodying the new idea, in turn, helps generate new creative ideas. There is evidence now that the time between each of the steps in this cycle has been shortened.

It is not merely true, as frequently noted, that 90 percent of all the scientists who ever lived are now alive and that new scientific discoveries are being made every day. These new ideas are put to work much more quickly than ever before. The time between original concept and practical use has been radically reduced. This is a striking difference between ourselves and our ancestors. Apollonius of Perga discovered conic sections, but it was 2000 years before they were applied to engineering problems. It was literally centuries between the time Paracelsus discovered that ether could be used as an anesthetic and the time it began to be used for that purpose. Even in more recent times, the same pattern of delay prevailed. In 1836, a machine was invented that mowed, threshed, tied straw into sheaves and poured grain into sacks. This machine was itself based on technology at least 20 years old at the time. Yet it was not until a century later, in the 1930s, that such a combine was acturally marketed. The firs English patent for a typewriter was issued in 1714. But a century and a half elapsed before typewriters became commercially available. A full century passed between the time Nicolas Appert discovered how to can food and the time when canning become important in the food industry.

Such delays between idea and application are almost unthinkable today. It isn't that we are more eager or less lazy than our ancestors, but that, with the passage of time, we have invented all sorts of social devices to hasten hte process. We find that the time between the first and second stages of the innovative cycle--between idea and application--has been radically shortened. Frank Lynn, for example, in studying 20 major innovations, such as frozen food. antibiotics integrated circuits and synthetic leather, found that since the beginning of this century, more than 60 percent has been slashed form the average time needed for a major scientific discovery to be translated into a useful technological form. William O Baker, vice-president of Bell Laboratories, itself the hatchery of such innovations as sound movies, computers, transistors and Telstar, underscores the narrowing gap between invention and application by noting that while it took 65 years for the electric motor to be applied, 33 years for the vacuum tube and 18 years for the X-ray tube, it took only 10 for the nuclear reactor, 5 for radar and only 3 for the transistor and the solar battery. A vast and growing research-and-development industry is working now to reduce the lag still further.

If it takes less time to bring a new idea to the market place, it also takes less time for it to sweep through society. The interval between the second and third stages of the cycle--between application and diffusion--has likewise been cut, and the pace of diffusion is rising with astonishing speed. this is borne out by the history of several familiar household appliances. Robert A Young, at the Stanford Research Institute, has studied the span of time between the first commercial appearance of a new electrical appliance and the time the industry manufacturing it reaches peak prodution of the item. He found that for a group of appliances introduced in the United States before 1920--including the vacuum cleaner, the electric range and the refrigerator--the average span between introduction and peak production was 34 years. But for a group that appeared in (continued on page 202)Future Shock(continued from page 98) the 1939-1959 period--including the electric frying pan, television and the washerdryer combination--the span was only eight years. The lag had shrunk by more than 76 percent.

The stepped-up pace of invention, exploitation and diffusion, in turn, accelerates the whole cycle even further. For new machines or techniques are not merely a product, but a source, of fresh creative ideas. Each new machine or technique, in a sense, changes all existing machines and techniques, by permitting us to put them together into new combinations. The number of possible combinations rises exponentially as the number of new machines or techniques rises arithmetically. Indeed, each new combination may, itself, be regarded as a new supermachine. The computer, for example, made possible a sophisticated space effort, Linked with sensing devices, communications equipment and power sources, the computer became part of a configuration that, in aggregate, forms a single new supermachine--a machine for reaching into and probing outer space But for machines or techniques to be combined in new ways, they have to be altered, adapted, refined or otherwise chnaged, So that the very effort to integrate machines into supermachines compels us to make still further technological innovations

It is vital to understand, moreover, that technological innovation does not merely combine and recombine machines and techniques. Important new machines do more than suggest or compel changes in other machines--they suggest novel solutions to social, philosophical, even personal problems. They alter man's total intellectual environment, the way he thinks and looks at the world. We all learn from our environment, scanning it constantly--though perhaps unconsciously--for models to emulate. These models are not only other people. They are, increasingly, machines. By their presence, we are subtly conditioned to think along certain lines. It has been observed, for example, that the clock came along before the Newtonian image of the world as a great clocklike mechanism, a philosophical notion that has had the utmost impact on man's intellectual development. Implied in this image of the cosmos as a great clock were ideas about cause and effect and about the importance of external, as against internal, stimuli that shape the everyday behavior of all of us today. The clock also affected our conception of time, so that the idea that a day is divided into 24 equal segments of 60 minutes each has become almost literally a part of us.

Recently, the computer has touched off a storm of fresh ideas about man as an interacting part of larger systems, about his physiology, the way he learns, the way he remembers, the way he makes decision. Virtually every intellectual discipline, from political science to family psychology, has been hit by a wave of imaginative hypotheses triggered by the invention and diffusion of the computer--and its full impact has not yet struck. And so the innovative cycle, feeding on itself, speeds up.

If technology, however, is to be regarded as a great engine, a mighty accelerator, then knowledge must be regarded as its fuel. And we thus come to the crux of the accelerative process in society. For the engine is being fed a richer and richer fuel every day.

The rate at which man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe has been spiraling upward for 10,000 years. That rate took a sharp leap with the invention of writing; but even so, it remained painfully slow over centuries of time. The next great leape in knowledge acquisition did not occur until the invention of movable type in the 15th Century by Gutenberg and others. Prior to 1500, by the most optimistic estimates, Europe was producing books at a rate of 1000 title per year. This means that it would take a full century to produce a library of 100,000 titles. By 1950, four and a half centuries later, the rate had accelerated so sharply that Europe was producing 120,000 titles a year. What once took a century now took only ten months. By 1960, a single decade later, that awesome rate of publication had made another significant jump, so that a century's work could be completed in seven and a half months. And by the mid-Sixties, the output of books on a world scale approached the prodigious figure of 1000 titles per day.

One can hardly argue that every book is a net gain for the advancement of knowledge, but we find that the accelerative curve in book publication does, in fact, roughly parallel the rate at which mans has discovered new knowledge. Prior to Gutenberg, for example, only 11 chemical elements were known Antimony, the 12th, was discovered about the time he was working on the printing press. It had been fully 200 years since the 11th, arsenic, had been discovered. Had the same rate of discovery continued, we would by now have added only two or three additional elements to the periodic table since Gutenberg. Instead, in the 500 years after his time, 73 additional elements were discovered. And since 1900, We have been isolating the remaining elements at a rate not of one every two centuries but of one every three years.

Furthermore, there is reason to believe that the rate is still rising sharply. The number of scientific journals and articles and the number of known chemical compounds are both doubling about every 15 years, like industrial production in the advanced countries. The doubling time for the number of asteroids known, the literature on non-Euclidean geometry, on experimental psychology and on the theory of determinants is only ten years, According to biochemist philip Siekevitz, "What has been learned in the last three decads bout the nature of living beings dwarfs about the nature of living beings dwarfs in extent of knowledge any comparable period of scientific discovery in the history of mankind." The U.S. Government alone generates over 300,000 reports each year, Plus 450,000 articles, books and papers. One a world-wide basis, scientific and technical literature mounts at a rate of some 60000,000 pages a year.

The computer burst upon the scene around 1950. With its unprecedented power for analysis and dissemination of extremely varied kinds of date in unbelievable quantities and at mind-staggering speeds, it has become a major force behind the latest acceleration in Knowledge acquisition. Combined with other increasingly powerful analytical tools for observing the invisible universe around us, it has raised the rate of knowledge acquisition to dumfounding speeds.

Francis Bacon told us that knowledge is power. This can now be translated into contemporary terms. In our social setting, Knowledge is change--and accelerating Knowledge acquisition, fueling the great engine of technology, means accelerating change.

Discovery. Application, impact. Discovery. We see here a chain reaction of change, a long, sharply rising curve of acceleration in human social development. This accelerative thrust has now reached a level at which it can no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as "normal." The established institutions of industrial society can no longer contain it, and its impact is shaking up all our social institutions. Acceleration is one of the most important and least understood of all social forces.

This, however, is only half the story. For the speed-up of change is more than a social force. It is a psychological force as well. Although it has been almost totally ignored by psychologists and psychiatrists, the rising rate of change in the world around us disturbs our inner equilibrium, alters the very way in which we experience life. The pace of life is speeding up.

Most of us, without stopping to think too deeply about it, sense this quickening of the pace of events. For it is not just a matter of explosive headlines, world crises and distant technological triumphs. The new pace of change penetrates our personal lives as well. No matter where we are, even the sounds of change are there. Cranes and concrete mixers keep up an angry clatter on the Champs Elyses and on connecticut Avenue. I happen to live in mid-Manhattan, where the noise level created by traffic and the incessant jackhmmering is virtually intolerable. Recently, to escape the frenetic pace of New York and do some writing, I flew to a remote beach in Venezuela. At the crack of dawn on the first morning after arrival, I was awakened by the familiar sound of a jackhammer: The hotel was building an addition.

Other symptoms of change abound. In a 17th Century convent in a suburb of Paris, I walked through a long, sundappled cloisier, up several flights of rickety wooden stairs, in a mood of silent reverie--until I turned a corner and found the man I had come to see: a Berkeley-trained operations reseracher with a desktop computer, busy strdying long-range change in the French education systm an deconomy. in the French education system and economy. In Amsterdam and Rotterdam, streets built only five years age are anticipated the rapidity with which automobiles would proliferate. As i cna attest from unpleasant personal experiece, change is also present inthe form of bumper-to-boot tranffic change-up on Stockholms's once-peaceful Strandvagen And in Japan, the pace is so swift that an American economist says wryly: "Steping off a plane in San Francisco after arriving from Tokyo gives ne the feeling of having returned to the 'unchanging West.' "

In Aldous Huxley's point counter-point, Lucy Tantamount declared that "Living modernly is living quickly." she should have been here now. Eating, once a leisurely semisocial affair, has become for millions a gulp-and-go proposition, and an enormous "fast-food" industry has arisen to purvey doughnuts, hamburgers. French fries, milk shakes,tacos and hot dogs, not to mention machine-vended hot soup, sandwiches, packaged pies and a variety of other quasi-edibles intended to be downded in a hurry. The critic Russell Lynes once attended a convention of fast-food executives. "I am not quite sure," he wrote, "whether the fast-food industry gets its name from the speed with which the food is prepared, served and eaten, or, on the other hand, from the fact that it is consumed by feeders of all ages on the run and, quite literally, on the wing." It was significant, he observed, that the convention was jointly held with a group of motelkeepers, whose prime passion in life is to keep the rest of us moving around.

As the pace accelerates, we seem to be always en route, never at our destination. The search for a place to stop, at least temporarily, is unwittingly symbolized by our increasingly hectic pursuit of that vanishing commodity--p parking place. As the number of autos grows and the number of places diminishes, so, too, does the allowable parking time. In New York and other major cities, what used to be one-hour meters have been converted to half-hour or 15-minute meters. The world awaits that crowning innovation: the 30-second parking slot. On the other hand, we may be bypassing that stage altogether by simply multiplying those disquieting signs that say No Standing.

Unconsciously, through exposure to a thousand such situations, we are conditioned to move faster, to interact more rapidly with other people, to expect things to happen sooner. When they don't, we are upset, Thus, economist W Allan Beckett of Toronto recently testified before the Canadian Transport Commission that the country needed faster telephone service. Sophisticated young people, he declared, would not be willing to wait six seconds for a dial tone if it were technically possible to provide it in three

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Much of this might sound like subjective grousing based on impressinistic evindence--except that such facts fall into a rigorously definable, scientifically verifiable and historically signifiacnt pattern. They add up to a powerful trend toward transience in the culture; and unless this is understood, we cannot make sense of the contemporary world. Indeed, trying to comprehend the politics, economics, art or psychology of the present--let alone of the future--without the concept of transience is as futile as trying to write the history of the Middle Ages without mentioning religion.

If acceleration has become a primal social force in our time, transience, its cultural, concomitant, has become a primal psychological force. The speed-up of change introduces a shaky sense of impermanence into our lives, a qualility of transience that will grow more and more intense in the years ahead. Change is now occurring so rapidly that things, places, people, organizations, ideas all pass through our lives at a faster clip than ever before. Each individual's relationships with the world outside himself become foreshortened, compressed. They become transient. The throwaway product, the nonreturnable bottle, the paper dress, the modular building, the temporary structure, the portable playgronud, the inflatable command post are all examples of things designed for short-term, transient purposes, and they require a whole new set of psychological responses from man. In slower-moving societies, man's relationships were more durable. The farmer bought a mule or a horse, worked it for years, then put it out to pasture. The relationship between man and beast spanned a great many years. Industrial-era man bought a car, instead, and kept it for several years. Superindustrial man, living at the new accelerated pace, generally deeps his car a shorter period before turning it in for a new one, and some never buy a car at all, preferring the even shorter-term relationships made possible by lease and rentals

Our links with place are also growing more transient. It is not simply that more of us travel more than ever before, by car, by jet and by boat, but more of us actually change our place of residence as well. In the United States each year, some 36,000,000 people change homes. This migration dwarfs all historical precedent, including the surge of the Mongol hordes across the Asian steppes. It also detonates a host of "micro-changes" in the society, contributing to the sense of transience and uncertainty, Example: Of the 885,000 listings in the Washington, D.C., telephone book in 1969, over half were different from the year before. Under the impact of this highly accelerated nomadism, all sorts of oncedurable ties are cut short. Nothing stays put--especially us.

Most of us today meet more people in the course of a few months than a Feudal serf did in his lifetime. This implies a faster turnover of people in our lives and, correspondingly, shorter-term relationships. We make and break ties with people at a pace that would have astonished our ancestors. This raises all kinds of commitment and involvement, the quality of friendship, the ability of humans to communicate with one another, the function of education, even of sex, in the future. Yet this extremely significant shift from longer to shorter interpersonal ties is only part of the larger, more encompassing movement toward high-transience society.

This movement can also be illustrated by changes in our great corporations and bureaucracies. Just as we have begun to make temporary products. We are also creating temporary organizations. This explains the incredible proliferation of ad hoc committees, task bureaucracy today is increasingly honeycombed with such transient organizational cells that require, among other things, that people migrate from department to department, and from task to task, at ever faster rates. We see, in most large organizations, a frenetic, restless shuffling of people. The rise o temporary organizations may spell the death of traditional bureaucracy. It points toward a new type of organization in the future--one I call Ad-Hocracy. At the same time, it intensifies, or hastens, the foreshortening of humanties.

Finally, the powerfull push toward a society based on transience can be seen in the impermanence of knowledge--the accelerating pace at which scientific nations, political ideologies, values and life-organizing concepts are turning orver This is, in part, based on the heavier loads of information transmitte4d to us by the communications media. In the U.S today, The median time spent by adults reading newspapers is 52 minutes perday. The same person who commits nearly an hour to the newspaper also spends some time reading other things as well--magazines books, sings, billboards, recipes, instructions, etc. Surrounded by print, he "ingests" between 10,000 and 20,000 edited words per day of the several times that many to which he is exposed. The same person also probably spends an hour and a quarter per day listening to the radio--more if the owns an FM set. If he listens to news, commercials, commentary or other such porgrams, he will, during this period, hear about 11,000 preprocessed words. He also spends several hours watching television--add another 10,000 words or so, plus a sequence of carefully arranged highly purposive visuals.

Nothings, indeed, is quite so purposive as advertising, and the average American adult today is assaulted by a minimum of 560 advertising messages each day. The verbal and visual bombardment of advertising is so great that of the 560 to which he exposed, he notices only 76. In effect, he blocks out 484 advertising messages a day to preserve his attention for other matters. All this represents the press of engineered messages against his nervous system, and the pressure is rising, for there is evidence that we are today tampering with our communications machinery in an effort to transmit even richer image-producing messages at an even faster rate. Communications people, artists and others are consciously working to make each instant of exposure to the mass media carry a heavier informational and emotional freight.

In this maelstrom of information, the certainties of last night become the ludicrous nonsense of this morning and the individual is forced to learn and relearn, to organize and reorganize the images that help him compprehend reality and funciton in it, The trend toward telescoped ties with things, places, people and organizations is matched by an accelerated turnover of information.

What emerges, therfore, are two interlinked trends, two driving forces of history: first, the acceleration of change itself; and, second, its cultural and psychological concomitant, transience. Together, they create a new ephemeralized environment for man--a high-transience society. Fascinating, febrile but, above all, fast, this society is racing toward future shock.

One of the astonishing, as-yet-unpublicized findings of medical research, for example, bears directly on the link-up between change and illness. Research conducted at the University of Washington Medical School, at the U.S. navy Neuropsychiatric Unit at San Diego, as well as in Japan, Europe and elsewhere, documents the disturbing fact that individuals who experience a great deal of change in their lives are more prone to illness--and the more radical and swift the changes, the more serious the illness. These studies suggest strongly that we cannot increase the rate at which we make and break our relationships with the environment without producing marked physiological changes in the human animal.

This is, of course, no argument against change. "There are worse things than illness," Dr. Thomas Holmes, a leader in life-change research, reminds us, dryly. yet the notion that change can be endlessly accelerated without harm to the individual is sharply challenged by the work of Holmes and many others. There are distinct limits to the speed with which man can respond to environmental change.

These limits, moreover, are psychological as well as physiological. The neural and hormonal responses touched off in the human boby when it is forced to adapt to change may well be accompanied by a deterioration of mental functioning as well. Research findings in experimental psychology, in communications theory, in management science, in human-factors engineering and in space biology all point the conclusion that man's ability to make sound decisions--top adapt--collapses when the rate at which he must make them is too fast, Whether driving a car, steering a space capsule of solving intellectual problems, we operate most efficiently within a certain range of response speeds. When we are insufficiently stimulated by change, we grow bored and our performance deteriorates. But, by the same token, When the rate of responses demanded of us becomes to high, we also break down.

Thus we see people who, living in the midst of the most turbulent change, blindly deny its existence. We meet the world-weary executive who smiles patronizingly at his son and mouths nonsense to the effect that nothing ever really changes. Such people derive comfort from the misleading notions that history repeats itself or that young people were always rebellious. Focusing attention exclusively on the continuities in experience, they desperately attempt t block out evidence of discontinuities, in the unconscious hope that they will therefore not have to deal with them. Yet change, roaring through the social order, inevitably overtakes even those who blind themselves to it. Censoring reality, blocking out important warning signals from the environment, the deniers set themselves up for massive maladaptation, virtually guaranteeing that when change catches up with them, it will come not in small and manageable steps but in the small and manageable steps but in the form of a single overwhelming crisis

Others respond to future shock by burrowing into a specially--a job, a hobby, a social role--and ignoring everything else. We find the electronics engineer who tries manfully to deep in touch with the latest work in his field. But the more world strife there is, the more outbreaks there are in the ghetto, the more campuses erupt into violence, the more compulsively he focuses on servomechanisms and intergrated circuits, Suffering from tunnel vision, monitoring an extremely narrow slice of reality, he becomes masterful at coping with a tightly limited range of life situations--but hope-less at everything else. Any sudden shift of the external environment poses for him the threat of total disorientation.

Yet another response to future shock is reversion to previously successful behavioral programs that are now irrelevant. The reversinist clicks back into an old routine and clings to it with dogmatic desperation. The more change whirls around him, the more blindly he attempts to apply the old action patterns and ideologies. The Barry Coldwaters and George Wallaces of the world appeal to his quivering gut through the politics of nostalgia. Police maintained order in the past; hence, to maintain order, we need only supply more police. Authoritarian treatment of children worked in the past;hence, the troubles of the present spring from permissiveness. The middle-aged, right-wing reversionist yearns for the simple, ordered society of the small town--the slow-paced social environment in which his old routines were appropriate. Instead of adapting to the new, he continues automatically to apply the old solutions, growing more and more divorced from reality as he does so.

If the older reversionist dreams of reinstating a small-town past, the youthful, left-wing reversionist dreams of reviving an even older social system. this accounts for some of the fascination with rural communes, the bucolic romanticism that fills the posters and poetry of the hippie and post-hippie subcultures, the deification of Ché Guevara (identified with mountains and jungles, not with urban or post-urban environments), the exaggerated veneration of pretechnological societies and the exaggerated contempt for science and technology. The left reversionist hands out anachronistic Marxist and Freudian cliché as knee-jerk answers for the problems of tomorrow.

Finally, there is the future-shock victim who attempts to cope with explosion of information, the pulsing waves of date, the novelty and change in the enviroment, by reducing everything to a single neat equation. Complexity terrisies him. The world slips from control when it is too complex. This helps explain the intellectual faddism that seizes on a McLuhan or a Marcuse or a Maharishi to explain all the problems of past, present and future. Upset by the untidiness of reality, the supersimplifier attempts to force it into an overneat set of dogmas. He then invests these with tremendous emotional force and clings to them with total conviction--until the next new world-explaining concept is merchandised by the media

In the field of action and activism, the passionate pursuit of the supersimple leads to supersimple solutions--such as violence. For the older generation and the political establishment, police truncheons and military bayonets loom as attractinve remedies, a way to end dissent once and for all. The vigilantes of the right and the brick-throwing cults of the left, overwhelmed by the onrushing complexities of change, employ violence to narrow their options and clarify their lives. Terrorism substitutes for thought.

These all-too-familiar forms of behavior can be seen as modes of response to future shock. They are the ways used by the future-shock victim to get through the thickening tangle of personal and social problems that seem to hit him with ever-increasing force an velocity. To the information scientist, these four responses--blocking-out, overspecilization, reversion and supersimplificaiton--are instantly recognizable, for they are classical ways of coping with overload. But classical or not, these tactics, pushed beyond a reasonable point, flower into full-blown pathology, endangering not merely the individual who employs them but the people around him as well.

Asked to adapt too rapidly, increasing numbers of us grow confused, bewildered, irritable and irrational. Sometimes we throw a tantrum, lashing out against friends of family or committing acts of senseless violence. Pressured too hard, we fall into profound lethargy--the same lethargy exhibited by battle-shocked soldiers of by change-hassled young people who, even without the dubious aid of drugs, all too often often seem stoned and apathetic. this is the hidden meaning of the dropout syndrome, the stop-the-world-I-wnat-to-get-off attitude, the search for tranquillity or nirvana in a host of moldy mystical ideas. Such philosophies are dredged up to provide intellectual justification for an apathy that is essentially unhealthy and anti-adaptive, and that is often a symptom not intellectual profundity but of future shock.

For future shock is what happens to men when they are pushed beyond their adaptive tolerances. It is the inevitable and crushing consequence of a society that running too fast for its own good--without even having a clear picture of where it wants to go.

Change is good. change is life itself. The justifications for radical changes in world society are more than ample. the ghetto, the campus, the deepening misery in the Third World all cry out for rapid change. But every time we accelerate a change, we need to take into account the effect it has on human copability. Just as we need to accelerate some changes, we need to decelerate others, We need to disign "future-shock absorbers"into the very fabric of the emergent society. If we don't, if we simply assume that man's capacity for change is infinite, we are likely to suffer a rude awakening in the form of massive adaptive break-down. We shall become the world's first future-shocked society.

Next month, in the concluding article of this series, Mr. Toffer discusses the kinds of future-shock absorbers that we can build into our personal lives and into the social structure to enhance our ability to cope with high-speed change.