I have piles of books everywhere but brought Alvin Toffler‘s Future Shock home with me from campus. I can vaguely remember reading it in college (although that might have been The Third Wave). Somehow, I just knew it would yield interesting history. And I wasn’t wrong.
In the Introduction, Toffler discusses the difficulty of writing when “the whole world is a fast-breaking story” (p. 4). The changing shape of the world leads to the “perishability of fact,” and he admits that despite updates, some of his facts will be obsolete by the time the book gets published. And don’t forget that I’m reading it 35 years after it was first published. More than just the facts have changed. Rather it seems the whole world has changed, which is, ultimately, Toffler’s theme. He points out that the “obsolescence of data has a special significance here…serving as it does to verify the book’s own thesis about the rapidity of change.
He goes on to lament the lot of writers in such a furiously accelerating world: “Writers have a harder and harder time keeping up with reality. We have not yet learned to conceive, research, write and publish in ‘real time.’ Readers, therefore, must concern themselves more and more with general theme, rather than detail” (p. 5) Since Toffler’s alive (he runs Toffler Associates, which appears to be a business consulting firm), I suppose he knows about blogs. What could be more “real time”?
But that real time aspect can also lead to trouble. Will Richardson has several posts related to careful blogging. Richardson points to the story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about candidates being passed over because of their blogging past. (Oh dear, maybe I shouldn’t be posting this…) And, David Weinberger, from Harvard (who I just saw at NECC) talks about the problem of “taking it back” when he discovered that he had reacted incorrectly to a post by a conservative commentator.
Toffler, I think, would forgive Weinberger. We’re going to make mistakes in this world of fast-breaking news. It’s what we do after we’ve made the mistake that’s important. Weinberger has tried to make it right, and, in the end, his sense of the commentator’s comments were on the mark. It was an anti-French sentiment that was inappropriate and deserving of rebuff.
