Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Read Free Page B

impediments by recasting them as bumps along the way to some better place—or at least an end to the journey. As long as there’s enough momentum, enough forward pull, and enough dramatic tension, we can suspend our disbelief enough to stay in the story.
    The end of the twentieth century certainly gave us enough momentum, pull, and tension. Maybe too much. Back in the quaint midcentury year of 1965,
Mary Poppins
was awarded five Oscars, the Grateful Dead played their first concert, and
I Dream of Jeannie
premiered on NBC. But it was also the year of the first spacewalk, the invention of hypertext, and the first successful use of the human respirator. These events and inventions, and others, were promising so much change, so fast, that Alvin Toffler was motivated to write his seminal essay “The Future as a Way of Life,” in which he coined the term “future shock”:
    We can anticipate volcanic dislocations, twists and reversals, not merely in our social structure, but also in our hierarchy of values and in the way individuals perceive and conceive reality. Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people. . . . Even the most educated people today operate on the assumption that society is relatively static. At best they attempt to plan by making simple straight-line projects of present-day trends. The result is unreadiness to meet the future when it arrives. In short, future shock. 3
    Toffler believed things were changing so fast that we would soon lose the ability to adapt. New drugs would make us live longer; new medical techniques would allow us to alter our bodies and genetic makeup; new technologies could make work obsolete and communication instantaneous. Like immigrants to a new country experiencing culture shock, we would soon be in a state of future shock, waking up in a world changing so rapidly as to be unrecognizable. Our disorientation would have less to do with any particular change than the rate of change itself.
    So Toffler recommended we all become futurists. He wanted kids to be taught more science fiction in school, as well as for them to take special courses in “how to predict.” The lack of basic predictive skills would for Toffler amount to “a form of functional illiteracy in the contemporary world.” 4
    To a great extent this is what happened. We didn’t get futurism classes in elementary school, but we did get an abject lesson in futurism from our popular and business cultures. We all became futurists in one way or another, peering around the corner for the next big thing, and the next one after that. But then we actually got there. Here. Now. We arrived in the future. That’s when the story really fell apart, and we began experiencing our first true symptoms of present shock.
    NARRATIVE COLLAPSE
    Toffler understood how our knowledge of history helps us put the present in perspective. We understand where we are, in part, because we have a story that explains how we got here. We do not have great skill in projecting that narrative ability into the future. As change accelerated, this inability would become a greater liability. The new inventions and phenomena that were popping up all around us just didn’t fit into the stories we were using to understand our circumstances. How does the current story of career and retirement adjust to life spans increasing from the sixties to the one hundreds? How do fertility drugs change the timeline of motherhood, how does email change our conception of the workweek, and how do robots change the story of the relationship of labor to management? Or, in our current frame of reference, how does social networking change the goals of a revolution?
    If we could only get better at imagining scenarios, modeling future realities, and anticipating new trends, thought Toffler, we may be less traumatized by all the change. We would be equipped to imagine new narrative pathways that accommodated all the