Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

It is these durational expectancies, different in each society but learned early and deeply ingrained, that are shaken up when the pace of life is altered.

This explains a crucial difference between those who suffer acutely from the accelerated pace of life and those who seem rather to thrive on it. Unless an individual has adjusted his durational expectancies to take account of continuing acceleration, he is likely to suppose that two situations, similar in other respects, will also be similar in duration. Yet the accelerative thrust implies that at least certain kinds of situations will be compressed in time.

The individual who has internalized the principle of acceleration – who understands in his bones as well as his brain that things are moving faster in the world around him – makes an automatic, unconscious compensation for the compression of time. Anticipating that situations will endure less long, he is less frequently caught off guard and jolted than the person whose durational expectancies are frozen, the person who does not routinely anticipate a frequent shortening in the duration of situations.

In short, the pace of life must be regarded as something more than a colloquial phrase, a source of jokes, sighs, complaints or ethnic put-downs. It is a crucially important psychological variable that has been all but ignored. During past eras, when change in the outer society was slow, men could, and did, remain unaware of this variable. Throughout one's entire lifetime the pace might vary little. The accelerative thrust, however, alters this drastically. For it is precisely through a step-up in the pace of life that the increased speed of broad scientific, technological and social change makes itself felt in the life of the individual. A great deal of human behavior is motivated by attraction or antagonism toward the pace of life enforced on the individual by the society or group within which he is embedded. Failure to grasp this principle lies behind the dangerous incapacity of education and psychology to prepare people for fruitful roles in a super-industrial society.

Much of our theorizing about social and psychological change presents a valid picture of man in relatively static societies – but a distorted and incomplete picture of the truly contemporary man. It misses a critical difference between the men of the past or present and the men of the future. This difference is summed up in the word "transience."

The concept of transience provides a long-missing link between sociological theories of change and the psychology of individual human beings. Integrating both, it permits us to analyze the problems of high-speed change in a new way. And, as we shall see, it gives us a method – crude but powerful – to measure inferentially the rate of situation flow.

Transience is the new "temporariness" in everyday life. It results in a mood, a feeling of impermanence. Philosophers and theologians, of course, have always been aware that man is ephemeral. In this grand sense, transience has always been a part of life. But today the feeling of impermanence is more acute and intimate. Thus Edward Albee's character, Jerry, in The Zoo Story, characterizes himself as a "permanent transient." And critic Harold Clurman, commenting on Albee, writes: "None of us occupy abodes of safety – true homes. We are all the same 'people in all the rooming houses everywhere,' desperately and savagely trying to effect soul-satisfying connections with our neighbors." We are, in fact, all citizens of the Age of Transience.

It is, however, not only our relationships with people that seem increasingly fragile or impermanent. If we divide up man's experience of the world outside himself, we can identify certain classes of relationships. Thus, in addition to his links with other people, we may speak of the individual's relationship with things. We can single out for examination his relationships with places. We can analyze his ties to the institutional or organizational environment around him. We can even study his relationship to certain ideas or to the information flow in society.

These five relationships – plus time – form the fabric of social experience. This is why, as suggested earlier, things, places, people, organizations and ideas are the basic components of all situations. It is the individual's distinctive relationship to each of these components that structures the situation.

And it is precisely these relationships that, as acceleration occurs in society, become foreshortened, telescoped in time. Relationships that once endured for long spans of time now have shorter life expectancies. It is this abbreviation, this compression, that gives rise to the almost tangible feeling that we live, rootless and uncertain, among shifting dunes.

Transience, indeed, can be defined quite specifically in terms of the rate at which our relationships turn over. While it may be difficult to prove that situations, as such, take less time to pass through our experience than before, it is possible to break them down into their components, and to measure the rate at which these components move into and out of our lives – to measure, in other words, the duration of relationships.

It will help us understand the concept of transience if we think in terms of the idea of "turnover." In a grocery store, for example, milk turns over more rapidly than, say, canned asparagus. It is sold and replaced more rapidly. The "through-put" is faster. The alert businessman knows the turnover rate for each of the items he sells, and the general rate for the entire store. He knows, in fact, that his turnover rate is a key indicator of the health of the enterprise.

We can, by analogy, think of transience as the rate of turnover of the different kinds of relationships in an individual's life. Moreover, each of us can be characterized in terms of this rate. For some, life is marked by a much slower rate of turnover than for others. The people of the past and present lead lives of relatively "low transience" – their relationships tend to be longlasting. But the people of the future live in a condition of "high transience" – a condition in which the duration of relationships is cut short, the through-put of relationships extremely rapid. In their lives, things, places, people, ideas, and organizational structures all get "used up" more quickly.

This affects immensely the way they experience reality, their sense of commitment, and their ability – or inability – to cope. It is this fast through-put, combined with increasing newness and complexity in the environment, that strains the capacity to adapt and creates the danger of future shock.

If we can show that our relationships with the outer world are, in fact, growing more and more transient, we have powerful evidence for the assumption that the flow of situations is speeding up. And we have an incisive new way of looking at ourselves and others. Let us, therefore, explore life in a high transience society.

"Barbie," a twelve-inch plastic teen-ager, is the best-known and best-selling doll in history. Since its introduction in 1959, the Barbie doll population of the world has grown to 12,000,000 – more than the human population of Los Angeles or London or Paris. Little girls adore Barbie because she is highly realistic and eminently dress-upable. Mattel, Inc., makers of Barbie, also sells a complete wardrobe for her, including clothes for ordinary daytime wear, clothes for formal party wear, clothes for swimming and skiing.

Recently Mattel announced a new improved Barbie doll. The new version has a slimmer figure, "real" eyelashes, and a twist-and-turn waist that makes her more humanoid than ever. Moreover, Mattel announced that, for the first time, any young lady wishing to purchase a new Barbie would receive a trade-in allowance for her old one.