Today marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Future Shock, the book by Alvin Toffler about rapidly accelerating change and how it affects us.
The author, now 81, and his wife, Heidi, were interviewed by NPR about the book, its genesis and its prescience. (Read the transcript here.) In the book, Alvin Toffler describes the then-1970s-era society moving into a state of “information overload,” with the rapid rate of change causing a sense of stress and disorientation–future shock, if you will.
Sound familiar?
It’s interesting to think about the products and technologies that have put us into a state of “future shock” in the last 20 or 30 years.
The rise of the personal computer? The advent of the Web? The coming of the cloud? The surge of social networking?
What technologies have been a future shock to your system?