Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  Today this crude, three-way division is clearly inadequate, and we are busy inventing far more specific categories. We now have a classification called "pre-teens" or "sub-teens" that sits perched between childhood and adolescence. We are also beginning to hear of "postteens" and, after that, "young marrieds." Each of these terms is a linguistic recognition of the fact that we can no longer usefully lump all "young persons" together. Increasingly deep cleavages separate one age group from another. So sharp are these differences that sociologist John Lofland of the University of Michigan predicts they will become the "conflict equivalent of southerner and northerner, capitalist and worker, immigrant and 'native stock,' suffragette and male, white and Negro."

  Lofland supports this startling suggestion by documenting the rise of what he calls the "youth ghetto" – large communities occupied almost entirely by college students. Like the Negro ghetto, the youth ghetto is often characterized by poor housing, rent and price gouging, very high mobility, unrest and conflict with the police. Like the Negro ghetto, it, too, is quite heterogeneous, with many subcults competing for the attention and allegiance of the ghettoites.

  Robbed of adult heroes or role models other than their own parents, children of streamlined, nuclear families are increasingly flung into the arms of the only other people available to them – other children. They spend more time with one another, and they become more responsive to the influence of peers than ever before. Rather than idolizing an uncle, they idolize Bob Dylan or Donovan or whomever else the peer group holds up for a life style model. Thus we are beginning to form not only a college student ghetto, but even semighettos of pre-teens and teenagers, each with its own peculiar tribal characteristics, its own fads, fashions, heroes and villains.

  We are simultaneously segmenting the adult population along age lines, too. There are suburbs occupied largely by young married couples with small children, or by middle-aged couples with teenagers, or by older couples whose children have already left home. We have specially-designed "retirement communities" for retirees. "There may come a day," Professor Lofland warns, "... when some cities will find that their politics revolve around the voting strength of various age category ghettos, in the same way that Chicago politics has long revolved around ethnic and racial enclaves."

  This emergence of age-based subcultures can now be seen as part of a stunning historical shift in the basis of social differentiation. Time is becoming more important as a source of differences among men; space is becoming less so.

  Thus communications theorist James W. Carey of the University of Illinois, points out that "among primitive societies and in the earlier stages of western history, relatively small discontinuities in space led to vast differences in culture ... Tribal societies separated by a hundred miles could have ... grossly dissimilar systems of expressive symbolism, myth and ritual." Within these same societies, however, there was "great continuity ... over generations ... vast differences between societies but relatively little variation between generations within a given society."

  Today, he continues, space "progressively disappears as a differentiating factor." But if there has been some reduction in regional variation, Carey takes pains to point out, "one must not assume that differences between groups are being obliterated ... as some mass society theorists [suggest]." Rather, Carey points out, "the axis of diversity shifts from a spatial ... to a temporal or generational dimension." Thus we get jagged breaks between the generations – and Mario Savio summed it up with the revolutionary slogan, "Don't trust anyone over thirty!" In no previous society could such a slogan have caught on so quickly.

  Carey explains this shift from spatial to temporal differentiation by calling attention to the advance of communications and transportation technology which spans great distances, and, in effect, conquers space. Yet there is another, easily overlooked factor at work: the acceleration of change. For as the pace of change in the external environment steps up, the inner differences between young and old become necessarily more marked. In fact, the pace of change is already so blinding that even a few years can make a great difference in the life experience of the individual. This is why some brothers and sisters, separated in age by a mere three or four years, subjectively feel themselves to be members of quite different "generations." It is why among those radicals who participated in the strike at Columbia University, seniors spoke of the "generation gap" that separated them from sophomores.

  MARITAL TRIBES

  Splintering along occupational, recreational and age lines, the society is also fragmenting along sexual-familial lines. Even now, however, we are already creating distinctive new subcults based on marital status. Once people might be loosely classified as either single, married or widowed. Today this three-way categorization is no longer adequate. Divorce rates are so high in most of the techno-societies today that a distinct new social grouping has emerged – those who are no longer married or who are between marriages. Thus Morton Hunt, an authority on the subject, describes what he terms "the world of the formerly married."

  This group, says Hunt, is a "subculture ... with its own mechanisms for bringing people together, its own patterns of adjustment to the separated or divorced life, its own opportunities for friendship, social life and love." As its members break away from their married friends, they become progressively isolated from those still in "married life" and "exmarrieds," like "teen-agers" or "surfers," tend to form social enclaves of their own with their own favored meeting places, their own attitudes toward time, their own distinct sexual codes and conventions.

  Strong trends make it likely that this particular social category will swell in the future. And when this happens, the world of the formerly married will, in turn, split into multiple worlds, more and still more sub-cultural groupings. For the bigger a subcult becomes, the more likely it is to fragment and give birth to new subcults.

  If the first clue to the future of social organization lies, therefore, in the idea of proliferating subcults, the second lies in sheer size. This basic principle is largely overlooked by those who are most exercised over "mass society," and it helps explain the persistence of diversity even under extreme standardizing pressures. Because of in-built limitations in social communication, size itself acts as a force pushing toward diversity of organization. The larger the population of a modern city, for example, the more numerous – and diverse – the subcults within it. Similarly, the larger the subcult, the higher the odds that it will fragment and diversify. The hippies provide a perfect example.

  HIPPIES, INCORPORATED

  In the mid-fifties, a small group of writers, artists and assorted hangers-on coalesced in San Francisco and around Carmel and Big Sur on the California coast. Quickly dubbed "beats" or "beatniks," they pieced together a distinctive way of life.

  Its most conspicuous elements were the glorification of poverty – jeans, sandals, pads and hovels; a predilection for Negro jazz and jargon; an interest in Eastern mysticism and French existentialism; and a general antagonism to technologically based society.

  Despite extensive press coverage, the beats remained a tiny sect until a technological innovation – lysergic acid, better known as LSD – appeared on the scene. Pushed by the messianic advertising of Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, distributed free to thousands of young people by irresponsible enthusiasts, LSD soon began to claim a following on the American campus, and almost as quickly spread to Europe as well. The infatuation with LSD was accompanied by a new interest in marijuana, a drug with which the beats had long experimented. Out of these two sources, the beat subcult of the mid-fifties and the "acid" subcult of the early sixties, sprang a larger group – a new subcult that might be described as a corporate merger of the two: the hippie movement. Blending the blue jeans of the beats with the beads and bangles of the acid crowd, the hippies became the newest and most hotly publicized subcult on the American scene.

  Soon, however, the pressures of growth proved too much for it. Thousands of teena
gers joined the ranks; millions of pre-teens watched their television sets, read magazine articles about the movement, and undulated in sympathy; some suburban adults even became "plastic" or weekend hippies. The result was predictable. The hippie subcult – exactly like General Motors or General Electric – was forced to divisionalize, to break down into subsidiaries. Thus out of the hippie subcult came a shower of progeny.

  To the eye of the uninitiated, all young people with long hair seemed alike. Yet important sub-units emerged within the movement. According to David Andrew Seeley, an acute young observer, there were at its height "perhaps a score of recognizable and distinct groups." These varied not only by certain subtleties of dress but by interest. Thus, Seeley reported, their activities ranged "from beer parties to poetry readings, from pot-smoking to modern dance – and often those who indulge in one wouldn't touch the other." Seeley then proceeded to explain the differences that set apart such groups as the teeny-boppers (now largely vanished from the scene), the political activist beatniks, the folk beatniks, and then, and only then, the original hippies per se.

  Members of these subcultural subsidiaries wore identifying badges that held meaning for insiders. Teeny-boppers, for example, were beardless, many, in fact, being too young to shave. Sandals were "in" with the folk set, but not some of the others. The tightness of one's trousers varied according to subcult.

  At the level of ideas, there were many common complaints about the dominant culture. But sharp differences emerged with respect to political and social action. Attitudes ranged from the conscious withdrawal of the acid hippie, through the ignorant unconcern of the teeny-bopper, to the intense involvement of the New Left activist and the politics-of-theabsurd activities of groupings like the Dutch provos, the Crazies, and the guerrilla theater crowd.

  The hippie corporation, so to speak, grew too large to handle all its business in a standardized way. It had to diversify and it did. It spawned a flock of fledgling subcultural enterprises.

  TRIBAL TURNOVER

  Even as this happened, however, the movement began to die. The most passionate LSD advocates of yesterday began to admit that "acid was a bad scene" and various underground newspapers began warning followers against getting too involved with "tripsters." A mock funeral was held in San Francisco to "bury" the hippie subcult, and its favored locations, Haight-Ashbury and the East Village turned into tourist meccas as the original movement writhed and disintegrated, forming new and odder, but smaller and weaker subcults and minitribes. Then, as though to start the process all over again, yet another subcult, the "skinheads," surfaced. Skinheads had their own characteristic outfits – suspenders, boots, short haircuts – and an unsettling predilection for violence.

  The death of the hippie movement and the rise of the skinheads provide a crucial new insight into the subcultural structure of tomorrow's society. For we are not merely multiplying subcults. We are turning them over more rapidly. The principle of transience is at work here, too. As the rate of change accelerates in all other aspects of the society, subcults, too, grow more ephemeral.

  Evidence pointing toward a decrease in the life span of subcults also lies in the disappearance of that violent subcult of the fifties, the fighting street gang. Throughout that decade certain streets in New York were regularly devastated by a peculiar form of urban warfare called the "rumble." During a rumble, scores, if not hundreds, of youths would attack one another with flailing chains, switchblade knives, broken bottles and zip-guns. Rumbles occurred in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and even as far away as London and Tokyo.

  While there was no direct connection between these far-flung outbreaks, rumbles were by no means chance events. They were planned and carried out with military precision by highly organized "bopping gangs." In New York these gangs affected colorful names – Cobras, Corsair Lords, Apaches, Egyptian Kings and the like. They fought one another for dominance in their "turf" – the specific geographic area they staked out for themselves.

  At their peak there were some 200 such gangs in New York alone, and in a single year, 1958, they accounted for no fewer than eleven homicides. Yet by 1966, according to police officials, the bopping gangs had virtually vanished. Only one gang was left in New York, and The New York Times reported: "No one knows on what garbage strewn street ... the last rumble took place. But it happened four or five years ago [which would date the death of the rumble a mere two or three years after the 1958 peak]. Then, suddenly, after a decade of mounting violence the era of the fighting gangs of New York came to an end." The same appeared to be true in Washington, Newark, Philadelphia and elsewhere as well.

  The disappearance of the violent street gangs has not, of course, led to an era of urban tranquility. The aggressive passions that led poor Puerto Rican and Negro youths in New York to wage war on rival gangs is now directed at the social system itself, and totally new kinds of social organizations, subcults and life style groupings are emerging in the ghetto.

  What we sense, therefore, is a process by which subcults multiply at an ever accelerating rate, and in turn die off to make room for still more and newer subcults. A kind of metabolic process is taking place in the bloodstream of the society, and it is speeding up exactly as other aspects of social interaction are quickening.

  For the individual, this raises the problems of choice to a totally new level of intensity. It is not simply that the number of tribes is expanding rapidly. It is not even that these tribes or subcults are bouncing off one another, shifting and changing their relationships to one another more and more rapidly. It is also that many of them will not hold still long enough to permit an individual to make a rational investigation of the presumed advantages or disadvantages of affiliation.

  The individual searching for some sense of belonging, looking for the kind of social connection that confers some sense of identity, moves through a blurry environment in which the possible targets of affiliation are all in high-speed motion. He must choose from among a growing number of moving targets. The problems of choice thus escalate not arithmetically, but geometrically.

  At the very instant when his choices among material goods, education, culture consumption, recreation and entertainment are all multiplying, he is also given a bewildering array of social choices. And just as there is a limit to how much choice he may wish to exercise in buying a car – at a certain point the addition of options requires more decisionmaking than they are worth – so, too, we may soon approach the moment of social overchoice.

  The level of personality disorder, neurosis, and just plain psychological distress in our society suggests that it is already difficult for many individuals to create a sensible, integrated, and reasonably stable personal style. Yet there is every evidence that the thrust toward social diversity, paralleling that at the level of goods and culture, is just beginning. We face a tempting and terrifying extension of freedom.

  THE IGNOBLE SAVAGE

  The more subcultural groupings in a society, the greater the potential freedom of the individual. This is why pre-industrial man, despite romantic myths to the contrary, suffered so bitterly from lack of choice.

  While sentimentalists prattle about the supposedly unfettered freedom of the primitive, evidence collected by anthropologists and historians contradicts them. John Gardner puts the matter tersely: "The primitive tribe or pre-industrial community has usually demanded far more profound submission of the individual to the group than has any modern society." As an Australian social scientist was told by a Temne tribesman in Sierra Leone: "When Temne people choose a thing, we must all agree with the decision – this is what we call cooperation."

  This is, of course, what we call conformity.

  The reason for the crushing conformity required of pre-industrial man, the reason the Temne tribesman has to "go along" with his fellows, is precisely that he has nowhere else to go. His society is monolithic, not yet broken into a liberating multiplicity of components. It is what sociologists call "undifferentiated."


  Like a bullet smashing into a pane of glass, industrialism shatters these societies, splitting them up into thousands of specialized agencies – schools, corporations, government bureaus, churches, armies – each subdivided into smaller and still more specialized subunits. The same fragmentation occurs at the informal level, and a host of subcults spring up: rodeo riders, Black Muslims, motorcyclists, skinheads and all the rest.

  This split-up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms.

  Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity – in the economy, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. The Super-industrial Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is – the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation.

  This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1000 organizational entities, there now stand 10,000 – interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there now are thousands of temporary subcults milling about, colliding and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society – bonds of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production – are breaking down.

  All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be "unmanageable" and universities "ungovernable." For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are no longer effective. A new, more finely fragmented social order – a super-industrial order – is emerging. It is based on many more diverse and shortlived components than any previous social system – and we have not yet learned how to link them together, how to integrate the whole.