Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Commitment takes many forms. One of these is attachment to place. We can understand the significance of mobility only if we first recognize the centrality of fixed place in the psychological architecture of traditional man. This centrality is reflected in our culture in innumerable ways. Indeed, civilization, itself, began with agriculture – which meant settlement, an end, at last, to the dreary treks and migrations of the paleolithic nomad. The very word "rootedness" to which we pay so much attention today is agricultural in origin. The precivilized nomad listening to a discussion of "roots" would scarcely have understood the concept.

The notion of roots is taken to mean a fixed place, a permanently anchored "home." In a harsh, hungry and dangerous world, home, even when no more than a hovel, came to be regarded as the ultimate retreat, rooted in the earth, handed down from generation to generation, one's link with both nature and the past. The immobility of home was taken for granted, and literature overflows with reverent references to the importance of home. "Seek home for rest, For home is best" are lines from Instructions to Housewifery, a sixteenthcentury manual by Thomas Tusser, and there are dozens of what one might, at the risk of a terrible pun, call "home-ilies" embedded in the culture. "A man's home is his castle ..." "There's no place like home ..." "Home, sweet home ..." The syrupy glorification of home reached, perhaps, a climax in nineteenth-century England at precisely the time that industrialism was uprooting the rural folk and converting them into urban masses. Thomas Hood, the poet of the poor, tells us that "each heart is whispering, Home, Home at last ..." and Tennyson paints a classically cloying picture of

In a world churned by the industrial revolution, and in which all things were decidedly not "in order stored," home was the anchorage, the fixed point in the storm. If nothing else, at least it could be counted upon to stay in one place. Alas, this was poetry, not reality, and it could not hold back the forces that were to tear man loose from fixed location.

The nomad of the past moved through blizzards and parching heat, always pursued by hunger, but he carried with him his buffalo-hide tent, his family and the rest of his tribe. He carried his social setting with him, and, as often as not, the physical structure that he called home. In contrast, the new nomads of today leave the physical structure behind. (It becomes an entry in the tables showing the turnover rate for things in their lives.) And they leave all but their family, the most immediate social setting, behind. The downgrading of the importance of place, the decline in commitment to it, is expressed in scores of ways. A recent example was the decision of Ivy League colleges in the United States to de-emphasize geographical considerations in their admissions policies. These elite colleges traditionally applied geographical criteria to applicants, deliberately favoring boys from homes located far from their campuses, in the hopes of assembling a highly diversified student body. Between the 1930's and the 1950's, for example, Harvard cut in half the percentage of its students from homes in New England and New York. Today, says an official of the university, "We're pulling back on this geographical distribution thing."

Place, it is now recognized, is no longer a primary source of diversity. Differences between people no longer correlate closely with geographical background. The address on the application form may be purely temporary anyway. Many people no longer stay in one place long enough to acquire distinctive regional or local characteristics. Says the dean of admissions at Yale: "Of course, we still send our recruiting people to out-of-the-way places like Nevada, but there's really as much diversity in taking Harlem, Park Avenue and Queens." According to this official, Yale has virtually dropped geography altogether as a consideration in selection. And his counterpart at Princeton reports: "It is not the place they're from, really, but rather some sense of a different background that we're looking for."

Mobility has stirred the pot so thoroughly that the important differences between people are no longer strongly place-related. So far has the decline in commitment to place gone, according to Prof. John Dyckman of the University of Pennsylvania, that "Allegiance to a city or state is even now weaker for many than allegiance to a corporation, a profession, or a voluntary association." Thus it might be said that commitments are shifting from placerelated social structures (city, state, nation or neighborhood) to those (corporation, profession, friendship network) that are themselves mobile, fluid, and, for all practical purposes, placeless.

Commitment, however, appears to correlate with duration of relationship. Armed with a culturally conditioned set of durational expectancies, we have all learned to invest with emotional content those relationships that appear to us to be "permanent" or relatively longlasting, while withholding emotion, as much as possible, from short-term relationships. There are, of course, exceptions; the swift summer romance is one. But, in general, across a broad variety of relationships, the correlation holds. The declining commitment to place is thus related not to mobility per se, but to a concomitant of mobility – the shorter duration of place relationships.

In seventy major United States cities, for example, including New York, average residence in one place is less than four years. Contrast this with the lifelong residence in one place characteristic of the rural villager. Moreover, residential relocation is critical in determining the duration of many other place relationships, so that when an individual terminates his relationship with a home, he usually also terminates his relationship with all kinds of "satellite" places in the neighborhood. He changes his supermarket, gas station, bus stop and barbershop, thus cutting short a series of other place relationships along with the home relationship. Across the board, therefore, we not only experience more places in the course of a lifetime, but, on average, maintain our link with each place for a shorter and shorter interval.

Thus we begin to see more clearly how the accelerative thrust in society affects the individual. For this telescoping of man's relationships with place precisely parallels the truncation of his relationship with things.

In both cases, the individual is forced to make and break his ties more rapidly. In both cases, the level of transience rises. In both cases, he experiences a quickening of the pace of life.

Each spring an immense lemming-like migration begins all over the Eastern United States. Singly and in groups, burdened with sleeping bags, blankets and bathing suits, some 15,000 American college students toss aside their texts and follow a highly accurate homing instinct that leads them to the sun-bleached shoreline of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There, for approximately a week, this teeming, milling mass of sun and sex worshippers swims, sleeps, flirts, guzzles beer, sprawls and brawls in the sands. At the end of this period the bikini-clad girls and their bronzed admirers pack their kits and join in a mass exodus. Anyone near the booth set up by the resort city to welcome this rambunctious army can now hear the loudspeaker booming: "Car with two can take rider as far as Atlanta ... Need ride to Washington ... Leaving at 10:00 for Louisville ..." In a few hours nothing is left of the great "beach-and-booze party" except butts and beer cans in the sand, and about $1.5 million in the cash registers of local merchants – who regard this annual invasion as a tainted blessing that threatens public sanity while it underwrites private profit.