Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Thus we have in many American suburbs a commercial "Welcome Wagon" service that accelerates the process by introducing newcomers to the chief stores and agencies in the community. A paid Welcome Wagon employee – usually a middle-aged lady – visits the newcomers, answers questions about the community, and leaves behind brochures and, sometimes, inexpensive gift certificates redeemable at local stores. Since it affects only relationships in the service category and is, actually, little more than a form of advertising, the Welcome Wagon's integrative impact is superficial.

The process of linking up with new neighbors and friends is, however, often quite effectively accelerated by the presence of certain people – usually divorced or single older women – who play the role of informal "integrator" in the community. Such people are found in many established suburbs and housing developments. Their function has been described by urban sociologist Robert Gutman of Rutgers University, who notes that while the integrator herself is frequently isolated from the mainstream of social life in the community, she derives pleasure from serving as a "bridge" for newcomers. She takes the initiative by inviting them to parties and other gatherings. The newcomers are duly flattered that an "oldtime" resident – in many communities "oldtime" means two years – is willing to invite them. The newcomers, alas, quickly learn that the integrator is herself an "outsider" whereupon, more often than not, they promptly disassociate themselves from her.

"Fortunately for the integrator," Gutman says, "by the time he or she managed to introduce the newcomer to the community and the newcomer in turn had gone on to abandon the integrator, there were new arrivals in the settlement to whom the integrator could once again proffer the hand of friendship."

Other people in the community also help speed the process of relationship formation. Thus, in developments, Gutman says, "Respondents reported that the real estate agents introduced them to neighbors before they had taken possession. In some cases, wives were called on by other wives in the neighborhood, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups. Neighboring wives, or husbands, encountered each other casually, while out gardening and cleaning up the yard or in tending children. And, of course, there were the usual meetings brought about by the children, who themselves often were the first to establish contact with the human population of the new environment."

Local organizations also play an important part in helping the individual integrate quickly into the community. This is more likely to be true among suburban homeowners than among housing development residents. Churches, political parties and women's organizations provide many of the human relationships that the newcomers seek. According to Gutman, "Sometimes a neighbor would inform the newcomer about the existence of the voluntary association, and might even take the newcomer to his first meeting; but even in these cases it was up to the migrant himself to find his own primary group within the association."

The knowledge that no move is final, that somewhere along the road the nomads will once more gather up their belongings and migrate, works against the development of relationships that are more than modular, and it means that if relationships are to be struck up at all, they had better be whipped into life quickly.

If, however, the breaking-in period is compressed in time, the leave-taking – the breaking-out – is also telescoped. This is particularly true of service relationships which, being unidimensional, can be both initiated and terminated with dispatch. "They come and they go," says the manager of a suburban food store. "You miss them one day and then you learn they've moved to Dallas." "Washington, D. C., retailers seldom have a chance to build long, enduring relationships with customers," observes a writer in Business Week. "Different faces all the time," says a conductor on the New Haven commuter line.

Even babies soon become aware of the transience of human ties. The "nanny" of the past has given way to the baby-sitter service which sends out a different person each time to mind the children. And the same trend toward time-truncated relationships is reflected in the demise of the family doctor. The late lamented family doctor, the general practitioner, did not have the refined narrow expertise of the specialist, but he did, at least, have the advantage of being able to observe the same patient almost from cradle to coffin. Today the patient doesn't stay put. Instead of enjoying a long-term relationship with a single physician, he flits back and forth between a variety of specialists, changing these relationships each time he relocates to a new community. Even within any single relationship, the contacts become shorter and shorter as well. Thus the authors of Crestwood Heights, discussing the interaction of experts and laymen, refer to "the short duration of any one exposure to each other ... The nature of their contact, which is in turn a function of busy, time-pressed lives on both sides, means that any message must be collapsed into a very brief communiqué, and that there must not be too many of these ..." The impact that this fragmentation and contraction of patient-doctor relationships has on health care ought to be more seriously explored.

Each time the family moves, it also tends to slough off a certain number of just plain friends and acquaintances. Left behind, they are eventually all but forgotten. Separation does not end all relationships. We maintain contact with, perhaps, one or two friends from the old location, and we tend to keep in sporadic touch with relatives. But with each move there is a deadly attrition. At first there is an eager flurry of letters back and forth. There may be occasional visits or telephone calls. But gradually these decrease in frequency. Finally, they stop coming. Says a typical English suburbanite after leaving London: "You can't forget it [London]. Not with all your family living there and that. We still got friends living in Plumstead and Eltham. We used to go back every weekend. But you can't keep that up."

John Barth has captured the sense of turnover among friendships in a passage from his novel The Floating Opera: "Our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we must either renew our friendship – catch up to date – or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more." The only fault in this is its unspoken suggestion that the current upon which friendships bob and float is lazy and meandering. The current today is picking up speed. Friendship increasingly resembles a canoe shooting the rapids of the river of change. "Pretty soon," says Professor Eli Ginzberg of Columbia University, an expert on manpower mobility, "we're all going to be metropolitan-type people in this country without ties or commitments to long time friends and neighbors." In a brilliant paper on "Friendships in the Future," psychologist Courtney Tall suggests that "Stability based on close relationships with a few people will be ineffective, due to the high mobility, wide interest range, and varying capacity for adaptation and change found among the members of a highly automated society ... Individuals will develop the ability to form close 'buddy-type' relationships on the basis of common interests or sub-group affiliations, and to easily leave these friendships, moving either to another location and joining a similar interest group or to another interest group within the same location ... Interests will change rapidly ...

"This ability to form and then to drop, or lower to the level of acquaintanceship, close relationships quickly, coupled with increased mobility, will result in any given individual forming many more friendships than is possible for most in the present ... Friendship patterns of the majority in the future will provide for many satisfactions, while substituting many close relationships of shorter durability for the few long-term friendships formed in the past."