Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

This does not even take into account the possible variations in color, upholstery and optional equipment.

Both car buyers and auto salesmen are increasingly disconcerted by the sheer multiplicity of options. The buyer's problem of choice has become far more complicated, the addition of each option creating the need for more information, more decisions and subdecisions. Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. In short, the auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants.

Yet we are only beginning the march toward destandardization of our material culture. Marshall McLuhan has noted that "Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colors available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer ... When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as cheap to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination." Many of McLuhan's other assertions are highly debatable. This one is not. He is absolutely correct about the direction in which technology is moving. The material goods of the future will be many things; but they will not be standardized. We are, in fact, racing toward "overchoice" – the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualization are cancelled by the complexity of the buyer's decision-making process.

Does any of this matter? Some people argue that diversity in the material environment is insignificant so long as we are racing toward cultural or spiritual homogeneity. "It's what's inside that counts," they say, paraphrasing a well-known cigarette commercial.

This view gravely underestimates the importance of material goods as symbolic expressions of human personality differences, and it foolishly denies a connection between the inner and outer environment. Those who fear the standardization of human beings should warmly welcome the destandardization of goods. For by increasing the diversity of goods available to man we increase the mathematical probability of differences in the way men actually live.

More important, however, is the very premise that we are racing toward cultural homogeneity, since a close look at this also suggests that just the opposite is true. It is unpopular to say this, but we are moving swiftly toward fragmentation and diversity not only in material production, but in art, education and mass culture as well.

One highly revealing test of cultural diversity in any literate society has to do with the number of different books published per million of population. The more standardized the tastes of the public, the fewer titles will be published per million; the more diverse these tastes, the greater the number of titles. The increase or decrease of this figure over time is a significant clue to the direction of cultural change in the society. This was the reasoning behind a study of world book trends published by UNESCO. Conducted by Robert Escarpit director of the Center for the Sociology of Literature at the University of Bordeaux, it provided dramatic evidence of a powerful international shift toward cultural destandardization.

Thus, between 1952 and 1962 the index of diversity rose in fully twenty-one of the twenty-nine chief book-producing nations. Among the countries registering the highest shifts toward literary diversity were Canada, the United States and Sweden, all with increases in excess of 50 percent or more. The United Kingdom, France, Japan and the Netherlands all moved from 10 to 25 percent in the same direction. The eight countries that moved in the opposite direction – i.e., toward greater standardization of literary outputwere India, Mexico, Argentina, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and Austria. In short, the more advanced the technology in a country, the greater the likelihood that it would be moving in the direction of literary diversity and away from uniformity.

The same push toward pluralism is evident in painting, too, where we find an almost incredibly wide spectrum of production. Representationalism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, hard-edge, pop, kinetic, and a hundred other styles are pumped into the society at the same time. One or another may dominate the galleries temporarily, but there are no universal standards or styles. It is a pluralistic marketplace.

When art was a tribal-religious activity, the painter worked for the whole community. Later he worked for a single small aristocratic elite. Still later the audience appeared as a single undifferentiated mass. Today he faces a large audience split into a milling mass of subgroups. According to John McHale: "The most uniform cultural contexts are typically primitive enclaves. The most striking feature of our contemporary 'mass' culture is the vast range and diversity of its alternative cultural choices ... The 'mass,' on even cursory examination, breaks down into many different 'audiences."'

Indeed, artists no longer attempt to work for a universal public. Even when they think they are doing so, they are usually responding to the tastes and styles preferred by one or another sub-group in the society. Like the manufacturers of pancake syrup and automobiles, artists, too, produce for "mini-markets." And as these markets multiply, artistic output diversifies.

The push for diversity, meanwhile, is igniting bitter conflict in education. Ever since the rise of industrialism, education in the West, and particularly in the United States, has been organized for the mass production of basically standardized educational packages. It is not accidental that at the precise moment when the consumer has begun to demand and obtain greater diversity, the same moment when new technology promises to make destandardization possible, a wave of revolt has begun to sweep the college campus. Though the connection is seldom noticed, events on the campus and events in the consumer market are intimately connected.

One basic complaint of the student is that he is not treated as an individual, that he is served up an undifferentiated gruel, rather than a personalized product. Like the Mustang buyer, the student wants to design his own. The difference is that while industry is highly responsive to consumer demand, education typically has been indifferent to student wants. (In one case we say, "the customer knows best"; in the other, we insist that "Papa – or his educational surrogate – knows best.") Thus the student-consumer is forced to fight to make the education industry responsive to his demand for diversity.

While most colleges and universities have greatly broadened the variety of their course offerings, they are still wedded to complex standardizing systems based on degrees, majors and the like. These systems lay down basic tracks along which all students must progress. While educators are rapidly multiplying the number of alternative paths, the pace of diversification is by no means swift enough for the students. This explains why young people have set up "para-universities" – experimental colleges and so-called free universities – in which each student is free to choose what he wishes from a mind-shattering smorgasbord of courses that range from guerrilla tactics and stock market techniques to Zen Buddhism and "underground theater."

Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track. For the students now pressuring higher education to destandardize, to move toward superindustrial diversity, will win their battle.