Joan's Reviews > Future Shock

I've read the first 40 pages, then quit.

The ideas in those 40 pages could have been expressed in three paragraphs --if they were worth being expressed.

Toffler describes the properties and consequences of the worst illness of our time: the future shock. In our time, live changes so fast that we no longer know how to act; to quote the author:

We no longer "feel" life as men did in the past. And this is the ultimate difference, the distinction that separates the truly contemporary man from all other.

and again

We have cut ourselves off from the old ways of thinking, of feeling, of adapting

The truth is, now in 2013, 40 years after the book, that humans are the same as always. Their problems, their preoccupations, their feelings are the same as Plato had, as Seneca had. Technology, its fast change, doesn't change the way we are; changes our lives, but not our essence.

The author described technology, 40 years ago, as our saviour. The truth is that technology doesn't serve humans any more, technology doesn't worry about making our lives better, we live now to buy technology, to buy phones and tables and computers. We work to have technology, we sell our time to buy it, when technology should be working for us to give us free time.

The author's abuse of the argument from authority doesn't make the points strong, and some times it is just a plain unqualified authority fallacy. That when he isn't using other fallacies, like slippery slope, begging the question or false cause.

He states at the beginning that his theory doesn't have to be right but useful. I don't know if it is any.