Future Shock

Events speed past us, compelling us to reassess our assumptions – our previous formed images of reality. Research topples older conceptions of man and nature. Ideas come and go at a frenetic rate. (A rate, that, in science at least, has been estimated to be twenty to one hundred times faster than a mere century ago.) Image-laden messages hammer at our senses. Meanwhile, language and art, the codes through which we transfer image-bearing messages to one another, are themselves turning over more rapidly.

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A new image that clearly fits somewhere into a subject matter slot, and which is consistent with images already stored there, gives us little difficulty. But if, as happens increasingly, the image is ambiguous, if it is inconsistent, or, worse yet, if it flies in the face of our previous inferences, the mental model has to be forcibly revised. Large numbers of images may have to be reclassified, shuffled, changed again until a suitable integration is found. Sometimes whole groups of image-structures have to be torn down and rebuilt. In extreme cases, the basic shape of the whole model has to be drastically overhauled.

Thus the mental model must be seen not as a static library of images, but as a living entity, tightly charged with energy and activity. It is not a "given" that we passively receive from outside. Rather, it is something we actively construct and reconstruct from moment to moment. Restlessly sca

At any given instant, i

Change, roaring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to reflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increasingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, withdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis – or even death.

To maintain our adaptive balance, to keep the gap within manageable proportions, we struggle to refresh our imagery, to keep it up-to-date, to relearn reality. Thus the accelerative thrust outside us finds a corresponding speed-up in the adapting individual. Our imageprocessing mechanisms, whatever they may be, are driven to operate at higher and higher speeds.

This has consequences that have been as yet largely overlooked. For when we classify an image, any image, we make a definite, perhaps even measurable, energy-investment in a specific organizational pattern in the brain. Learning requires energy; and relearning requires even more. "All the researches on learning," writes Harold D. Lasswell of Yale, "seem to confirm the view that 'energies' are bound in support of past learning, and that new energies are essential to unbind the old ..." At the neurological level, he continues, "Any established system appears to include exceedingly intricate arrangements of cell material, electrical charges and chemical elements. At any cross section in time ... the somatic structure represents a tremendous investment of fixed forms and potentials ..." What this means in brief is very simple: there are costs involved in relearning – or, in our terminology, reclassifying imagery.

In all the talk about the need for continuing education, in all the popular discussions of retraining, there is an assumption that man's potentials for re-education are unlimited. This is, at best, an assumption, not a fact, and it is an assumption that needs close and scientific scrutiny. The process of image formation and classification is, in the end, a physical process, dependent upon finite characteristics of nerve cells and body chemicals. In the neural system as now constituted there are, in all likelihood, inherent limits to the amount and speed of image processing that the individual can accomplish. How fast and how continuously can the individual revise his i

Nobody knows. It may well be that the limits stretch so far beyond present needs, that such gloomy speculations are unjustified. Yet one salient fact commands attention: by speeding up change in the outer world, we compel the individual to relearn his environment at every moment. This, in itself, places a new demand on the nervous system. The people of the past, adapting to comparatively stable environments, maintained longer-lasting ties with their own i

Transience, then, the forcible abbreviation of man's relationships, is not merely a condition of the external world. It has its shadow within us as well. New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external world erupt into our lives in the form of increased turnover rates – shorter and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life. They demand a new level of adaptability. And they set the stage for that potentially devastating social illness – future shock.