Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

It is here that the danger of future shock lies. This danger, as we shall now see, is intensified by the impact of the accelerative thrust in the realm of information.

In a society in which instant food, instant education and even instant cities are everyday phenomena, no product is more swiftly fabricated or more ruthlessly destroyed than the instant celebrity. Nations advancing toward super-industrialism sharply step up their output of these "psycho-economic" products. Instant celebrities burst upon the consciousness of millions like an image-bomb – which is exactly what they are.

Within less than one year from the time a Cockney girl-child nicknamed "Twiggy" took her first modelling job, millions of human beings around the globe stored mental images of her in their brain. A dewy-eyed blonde with minimal mammaries and pipestem legs, Twiggy exploded into celebrityhood in 1967. Her winsome face and malnourished figure suddenly appeared on the covers of magazines in Britain, America, France, Italy and other countries. Overnight, Twiggy eyelashes, mannikins, perfumes and clothes began to gush from the fad mills. Critics pontificated about her social significance. Newsmen accorded her the kind of coverage normally reserved for a peace treaty or a papal election.

By now, however, our stored mental images of Twiggy have been largely erased. She has all but vanished from public view. Reality has confirmed her own shrewd estimate that "I may not be around here for another six months." For images, too, have become increasingly transient – and not only the images of models, athletes or entertainers. Not long ago I asked a highly intelligent teenager whether she and her classmates had any heroes. I said, "Do you regard John Glenn, for example, as a hero?" (Glenn being, lest the reader has forgotten, the first American astronaut to orbit in space.) The child's response was revealing. "No," she said, "he's too old."

At first I thought she regarded a man in his forties as being too old to be a hero. Soon I realized this was mistaken. What she meant was that Glenn's exploits had taken place too long ago to be of interest. (John H. Glenn's history-making flight occurred in February, 1962.) Today Glenn has receded from the foreground of public attention. In effect, his image has decayed.

Twiggy, the Beatles, John Glenn, Billie Sol Estes, Bob Dylan, Jack Ruby, Norman Mailer, Eichmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georgi Malenkov, Jacqueline Kennedy – thousands of "personalities" parade across the stage of contemporary history. Real people, magnified and projected by the mass media, they are stored as images in the minds of millions of people who have never met them, never spoken to them, never seen them "in person." They take on a reality almost as (and sometimes even more) intense than that of many people with whom we do have "in-person" relationships.

We form relationships with these "vicarious people," just as we do with friends, neighbors and colleagues. And just as the through-put of real, in-person people in our lives is increasing, and the duration of our average relationship with them decreasing, the same is true of our ties with the vicarious people who populate our minds.

Their rate of flow-through is influenced by the real rate of change in the world. Thus, in politics, for example, we find that the British prime ministership has been turning over since 1922 at a rate some 13 percent faster than in the base period 1721-1922. In sports, the heavyweight boxing championship now changes hands twice as fast as it did during our father's youth. (Between 1882 and 1932, there were ten new world heavyweight boxing champions, each holding the crown an average of 5 years. Between 1932 and 1951, there were 7 champions, each with an average tenure of 3.2 years. From 1951 to 1967, when the World Boxing Association declared the title vacant, 7 men held the championship for an average of 2.3 years each.) Events, moving faster, constantly throw new personalities into the charmed circle of celebrityhood, and old images in the mind decay to make way for the new.

The same might be said for the fictional characters spewed out from the pages of books, from television screens, theaters, movies and magazines. No previous generation in history has had so many fictional characters flung at it. Commenting on the mass media, historian Marshall Fishwick wryly declares: "We may not even get used to Super-Hero, Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific before they fly off our television screens forever."

These vicarious people, both live and fictional, play a significant role in our lives, providing models for behavior, acting out for us various roles and situations from which we draw conclusions about our own lives. We deduce lessons from their activities, consciously or not. We learn from their triumphs and tribulations. They make it possible for us to "try on" various roles or life styles without suffering the consequences that might attend such experiments in real life. The accelerated flow-through of vicarious people cannot but contribute to the instability of personality patterns among many real people who have difficulty in finding a suitable life style.

These vicarious people, however, are not independent of one another. They perform their roles in a vast, complexly organized "public drama" which is, in the words of sociologist Orrin Klapp, author of a fascinating book called Symbolic Leaders, largely a product of the new communications technology. This public drama, in which celebrities upstage and replace celebrities at an accelerating rate, has the effect, according to Klapp, of making leadership "more unstable than it would be otherwise. Contretemps, upsets, follies, contests, scandals, make a feast of entertainment or a spinning political roulette wheel. Fads come and go at a dizzying pace ... A country like the United States has an open public drama, in which new faces appear daily, there is always a contest to steal the show, and almost anything can happen and often does." What we are observing, says Klapp, is a "rapid turnover of symbolic leaders."

This can be extended, however, into a far more powerful statement: what is happening is not merely a turnover of real people or even fictional characters, but a more rapid turnover of the images and image-structures in our brains. Our relationships with these images of reality, upon which we base our behavior, are growing, on average, more and more transient. The entire knowledge system in society is undergoing violent upheaval. The very concepts and codes in terms of which we think are turning over at a furious and accelerating pace. We are increasing the rate at which we must form and forget our images of reality.

Every person carries within his head a mental model of the world – a subjective representation of external reality. This model consists of tens upon tens of thousands of images. These may be as simple as a mental picture of clouds scudding across the sky. Or they may be abstract inferences about the way things are organized in society. We may think of this mental model as a fantastic internal warehouse, an image emporium in which we store our inner portraits of Twiggy, Charles De Gaulle or Cassius Clay, along with such sweeping propositions as "Man is basically good" or "God is dead."

Any person's mental model will contain some images that approximate reality closely, along with others that are distorted or inaccurate. But for the person to function, even to survive, the model must bear some overall resemblance to reality. As V. Gordon Childe has written in Society and Knowledge, "Every reproduction of the external world, constructed and used as a guide to action by an historical society, must in some degree correspond to that reality. Otherwise the society could not have maintained itself; its members, if acting in accordance with totally untrue propositions, would not have succeeded in making even the simplest tools and in securing therewith food and shelter from the external world."