Rating: 
Summary: Another outdated idea from the Sixties.
Review: Toffler coined the phrase "future shock" to describe the discomfiture of Americans who had grown up before the Second World War and were overwhelmed by the economic, technological and social changes sweeping over the U.S. by the late 1960's. For example, my father was born in 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, and grew up in a world before antibiotics, computers, nuclear power, jet travel, space lauches, etc. entered the material culture. He didn't get to see his first television broadcast until well into his 20's. So perhaps by the late 1960's he was feeling "future shock."I, by contrast, was born in 1959, and all of these things have been part of my environment in one way or another since then. A lot of the stuff considered "cutting edge" these days is based on ideas that had already worked out by the 1970's, though instantiated perhaps in unforeseen ways. The world I see around me in the early 21st Century hasn't really changed that much since my teens. It already sounds "retro" to refer to our time as the Jet/Atomic/Space/Information Age. And we are still struggling with a lot of chronic problems that haven't been solved through technological progress, like dependence on fossil fuels, even though we should have learned our lesson from what happened to the U.S. in the 1970's. So where is all the "future shock" I'm supposed to feel? Toffler's "classic" book reminds me of similar meretricious intellectual fads from the 1960's that few people take seriously these days, like the belief that the drug-tripping Counterculture was going to inaugurate a utopian society and nonsense of that sort. I suppose it has some historical interest as popular intellectualism from that era, along with books by the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Timothy Leary and Abraham Maslow. But it really doesn't describe the sort of world we live in.
Rating: 
Summary: A timely work
Review: Toffler saw something important. He in 1970 saw that the accelerated pace of technological development would have a profound effect on the daily life of individuals. He understood that the disjunction between the technological changes and the human adaptation to them would be the source of major problems.
He understand that a new era of customization was bringing a variety to human choice, a kind of freedom which might in another sense take away freedom. He saw too the importance of ' information' and how it would be at the heart of transforming the world economy.
Toffler went on to write a number of other works about ' social change in the future' but this is by far the most interesting and profound one.
'Future Shock' is now a part of mankind's vocabulary and a continual element in our everyday life - experience.
Who knows what will come next and how wonderful or terrible it will be for us all?
Rating: 
Summary: He does lack historical perspective but...
Review: While Toffler here seems to lack some historical perspective on how science and technology will progress, his basic thesis is still unerringly on target. What I think is obvious is that he doesn't much consider how economic systems of the past (mainly capitalism) and economic class relations will affect how the accelerating change produced by science & technology will unfold. He doesn't forsee the many contradictions current economic relations will produce and he doesn't anticipate the power of the reactionary political and economic forces they will unleash, or he doesn't really pay enough attention to these forces in his speculations. Sometimes it seems in all his speculations about changes, he assumes that some things, mainly class realtions and economic power structures, will for no apparent reason, remain the same and not need any replacements or alterations. And he seems to ignore some major ways in which we are and probably will continue to fail to adapt. Also apparent is a lack of experience with the marketing industry, the real force behind his 'experience makers'. Either way though, the basic thesis of the book is an invalueable tool in understanding the present, and of course, making educated guesses as to the future. I would like to seen someone with more historical perspective and mre experience in the sordid world of marketing/PR rewrite this book today. People interested in the 'experiience makers' Toffler describes might find Wilson Brian Key's 'The Age of Manipulation' especially interesting, if sometimes vauge and (only slightly) over zealous.
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