Future Shock

Lofland supports this startling suggestion by documenting the rise of what he calls the "youth ghetto" – large communities occupied almost entirely by college students. Like the Negro ghetto, the youth ghetto is often characterized by poor housing, rent and price gouging, very high mobility, unrest and conflict with the police. Like the Negro ghetto, it, too, is quite heterogeneous, with many subcults competing for the attention and allegiance of the ghettoites.

Robbed of adult heroes or role models other than their own parents, children of streamlined, nuclear families are increasingly flung into the arms of the only other people available to them – other children. They spend more time with one another, and they become more responsive to the influence of peers than ever before. Rather than idolizing an uncle, they idolize Bob Dylan or Donovan or whomever else the peer group holds up for a life style model. Thus we are begi

We are simultaneously segmenting the adult population along age lines, too. There are suburbs occupied largely by young married couples with small children, or by middle-aged couples with teenagers, or by older couples whose children have already left home. We have specially-designed "retirement communities" for retirees. "There may come a day," Professor Lofland warns, "... when some cities will find that their politics revolve around the voting strength of various age category ghettos, in the same way that Chicago politics has long revolved around ethnic and racial enclaves."

This emergence of age-based subcultures can now be seen as part of a stu

Thus communications theorist James W. Carey of the University of Illinois, points out that "among primitive societies and in the earlier stages of western history, relatively small discontinuities in space led to vast differences in culture ... Tribal societies separated by a hundred miles could have ... grossly dissimilar systems of expressive symbolism, myth and ritual." Within these same societies, however, there was "great continuity ... over generations ... vast differences between societies but relatively little variation between generations within a given society."

Today, he continues, space "progressively disappears as a differentiating factor." But if there has been some reduction in regional variation, Carey takes pains to point out, "one must not assume that differences between groups are being obliterated ... as some mass society theorists [suggest]." Rather, Carey points out, "the axis of diversity shifts from a spatial ... to a temporal or generational dimension." Thus we get jagged breaks between the generations – and Mario Savio summed it up with the revolutionary slogan, "Don't trust anyone over thirty!" In no previous society could such a slogan have caught on so quickly.

Carey explains this shift from spatial to temporal differentiation by calling attention to the advance of communications and transportation technology which spans great distances, and, in effect, conquers space. Yet there is another, easily overlooked factor at work: the acceleration of change. For as the pace of change in the external environment steps up, the i

Splintering along occupational, recreational and age lines, the society is also fragmenting along sexual-familial lines. Even now, however, we are already creating distinctive new subcults based on marital status. Once people might be loosely classified as either single, married or widowed. Today this three-way categorization is no longer adequate. Divorce rates are so high in most of the techno-societies today that a distinct new social grouping has emerged – those who are no longer married or who are between marriages. Thus Morton Hunt, an authority on the subject, describes what he terms "the world of the formerly married."

This group, says Hunt, is a "subculture ... with its own mechanisms for bringing people together, its own patterns of adjustment to the separated or divorced life, its own opportunities for friendship, social life and love." As its members break away from their married friends, they become progressively isolated from those still in "married life" and "exmarrieds," like "teen-agers" or "surfers," tend to form social enclaves of their own with their own favored meeting places, their own attitudes toward time, their own distinct sexual codes and conventions.

Strong trends make it likely that this particular social category will swell in the future. And when this happens, the world of the formerly married will, in turn, split into multiple worlds, more and still more sub-cultural groupings. For the bigger a subcult becomes, the more likely it is to fragment and give birth to new subcults.

If the first clue to the future of social organization lies, therefore, in the idea of proliferating subcults, the second lies in sheer size. This basic principle is largely overlooked by those who are most exercised over "mass society," and it helps explain the persistence of diversity even under extreme standardizing pressures. Because of in-built limitations in social communication, size itself acts as a force pushing toward diversity of organization. The larger the population of a modern city, for example, the more numerous – and diverse – the subcults within it. Similarly, the larger the subcult, the higher the odds that it will fragment and diversify. The hippies provide a perfect example.

In the mid-fifties, a small group of writers, artists and assorted hangers-on coalesced in San Francisco and around Carmel and Big Sur on the California coast. Quickly dubbed "beats" or "beatniks," they pieced together a distinctive way of life.

Its most conspicuous elements were the glorification of poverty – jeans, sandals, pads and hovels; a predilection for Negro jazz and jargon; an interest in Eastern mysticism and French existentialism; and a general antagonism to technologically based society.

Despite extensive press coverage, the beats remained a tiny sect until a technological i

Soon, however, the pressures of growth proved too much for it. Thousands of teenagers joined the ranks; millions of pre-teens watched their television sets, read magazine articles about the movement, and undulated in sympathy; some suburban adults even became "plastic" or weekend hippies. The result was predictable. The hippie subcult – exactly like General Motors or General Electric – was forced to divisionalize, to break down into subsidiaries. Thus out of the hippie subcult came a shower of progeny.