Alvin Toffler | |
|---|---|
 Toffler in 2006 | |
| Born | Alvin Eugene Toffler (1928-10-04)October 4, 1928 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | June 27, 2016(2016-06-27) (aged 87) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary, Westwood, Los Angeles |
| Occupation |
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| Alma mater | New York University (BA) |
| Notable works | |
| Notable awards | |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
Alvin Eugene Toffler[1] (October 4, 1928 – June 27, 2016) was an American writer,futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including thedigital revolution and thecommunication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide. He is regarded as one of the world's outstanding futurists.[2]
Toffler was an associate editor ofFortune magazine. In his early works he focused on technology and its impact, which he termed "information overload". In 1970, his first major book about the future,Future Shock, became a worldwide best-seller and has sold over 6 million copies.
He and his wife Heidi Toffler (1929–2019), who collaborated with him for most of his writings, moved on to examining the reaction tochanges in society with another best-selling book,The Third Wave, in 1980. In it, he foresaw such technological advances ascloning, personal computers, the Internet, cable television and mobile communication. His later focus, via their other best-seller,Powershift, (1990), was on the increasing power of 21st-centurymilitary hardware and the proliferation of new technologies.
He founded Toffler Associates, amanagement consulting company, and was avisiting scholar at theRussell Sage Foundation, visiting professor atCornell University, faculty member of theNew School for Social Research, aWhite House correspondent, and a business consultant.[3] Toffler's ideas and writings were a significant influence on the thinking of business and government leaders worldwide, including China'sZhao Ziyang, andAOL founderSteve Case.[4]
Alvin Toffler was born on October 4, 1928, in New York City,[5] and raised in Brooklyn. He was the son of Rose (Albaum) and Sam Toffler, afurrier, bothPolish Jews who had migrated to America.[6][7] He had one younger sister.[7] He was inspired to become a writer at the age of 7 by his aunt and uncle, who lived with the Tofflers. "They were Depression-era literary intellectuals," Toffler said, "and they always talked about exciting ideas."[7]
Toffler graduated fromNew York University in 1950 as an English major, though by his own account he was more focused on political activism than grades.[7] He met his future wife, Adelaide Elizabeth Farrell (nicknamed "Heidi"), when she was starting a graduate course in linguistics. Being radical students, they decided against further graduate work and moved toCleveland, Ohio, where they married on April 29, 1950.[7]
Seeking experiences to write about, Alvin and Heidi Toffler spent the next five years asblue collar workers onassembly lines while studying industrialmass production in their daily work.[7] He compared his own desire for experience to other writers, such asJack London, who in his quest for subjects to write about sailed the seas, andJohn Steinbeck, who went to pick grapes with migrant workers.[8] In their first factory jobs, Heidi became aunionshop steward in the aluminum foundry where she worked. Alvin became a millwright and welder.[7][9] In the evenings Alvin would write poetry and fiction, but discovered he was proficient at neither.[7]
His hands-on practical labor experience helped Alvin Toffler land a position at a union-backed newspaper, a transfer to its Washington bureau in 1957, then three years as aWhite House correspondent, covering Congress and the White House for a Pennsylvania daily newspaper.[7][10]
They returned to New York City in 1959 whenFortune magazine invited Alvin to become its labor columnist, later having him write about business and management.[7] After leavingFortune magazine in 1962, Toffler began a freelance career, writing long form articles for scholarly journals and magazines.[7] His 1964Playboy interviews with Russian novelistVladimir Nabokov andAyn Rand were considered among the magazine's best.[7] His interview with Rand was the first time the magazine had given such a platform to a female intellectual, which as one commentator said, "the real bird of paradise Toffler captured for Playboy in 1964 was Ayn Rand."[11]
Toffler was hired byIBM to conduct research and write a paper on the social and organizational impact of computers, leading to his contact with the earliest computer "gurus" and artificial intelligence researchers and proponents.Xerox invited him to write about its research laboratory andAT&T consulted him for strategic advice. This AT&T work led to a study of telecommunications, which advised the company's top management to break up the company more than a decade before the government forced AT&T to break up.[12]
In the mid-1960s, the Tofflers began five years of research on what would becomeFuture Shock, published in 1970.[7][9] It has sold over 6 million copies worldwide, according to theNew York Times, or over 15 million copies according to the Tofflers' Web site.[7][13] Toffler coined the term "future shock" to refer to what happens to a society when change happens too fast, which results in social confusion and normal decision-making processes breaking down.[14] The book has never been out of print and has been translated into dozens of languages.[7]
He continued the theme inThe Third Wave in 1980. While he describes the first and second waves as the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the "third wave," a phrase he coined, represents the current information, computer-based revolution. He forecast the spread of the Internet and email, interactive media, cable television, cloning, and other digital advancements.[15] He claimed that one of the side effects of the digital age has been "information overload," another term he coined.[16] In 1990, he wrotePowershift, also with the help of his wife, Heidi.[7]
In 1996, with American business consultant Tom Johnson, they co-founded Toffler Associates, an advisory firm designed to implement many of the ideas the Tofflers had written on. The firm worked with businesses, NGOs, and governments in the United States, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Australia, and other countries. During this period in his career, Toffler lectured worldwide, taught at several schools and met world leaders, such asMikhail Gorbachev, along with key executives and military officials.[17]
"A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it. This new civilization brings with it new family styles; changed ways of working, loving, and living; a new economy; new political conflicts; and beyond all this an altered consciousness as well...The dawn of this new civilization is the single most explosive fact of our lifetimes."
Toffler stated many of his ideas during an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1998.[19] "Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest," he said. "Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone."[19]
His opinions about the future of education, many of which were inFuture Shock, have often been quoted. An often misattributed quote, however, is that of psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy: "Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."[20]
Early in his career, after traveling to other countries, he became aware of the new and myriad inputs that visitors received from these other cultures. He explained during an interview that some visitors would become "truly disoriented and upset" by the strange environment, which he described as a reaction toculture shock.[21] From that issue, he foresaw another problem for the future, when a culturally "new environment comes to you ... and comes to you rapidly." That kind of sudden cultural change within one's own country, which he felt many would not understand, would lead to a similar reaction, one of "future shock", which he wrote about in his book by that title.[21] Toffler writes:
We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots—religion, nation, community, family, or profession—are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.[17][22]
InThe Third Wave, Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of "waves"—each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.[23] He describes the "First Wave" as the society afteragrarian revolution and replaced the firsthunter-gatherer cultures. The "Second Wave," he labels society during theIndustrial Revolution (ca. late 17th century through the mid-20th century). That period saw the increase of urban industrial populations which had undermined the traditionalnuclear family, and initiated a factory-like education system, and the growth of the corporation. Toffler said:
The Second Wave Society is industrial and based onmass production,mass distribution,mass consumption,mass education, mass media, massrecreation, mass entertainment, andweapons of mass destruction. You combine those things withstandardization,centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we callbureaucracy.[19]
The "Third Wave" was a term he coined to describe thepost-industrial society, which began in the late 1950s. His description of this period dovetails with other futurist writers, who also wrote about theInformation Age,Space Age,Electronic Era,Global Village, terms which highlighted a scientific-technological revolution.[13] The Tofflers claimed to have predicted a number of geopolitical events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the future economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region.[13]
Toffler often visited with dignitaries in Asia, including China'sZhao Ziyang, Singapore'sLee Kuan Yew and South Korea'sKim Dae Jung, all of whom were influenced by his views as Asia's emerging markets increased in global significance during the 1980s and 1990s.[13] Although they had originally censored some of his books and ideas, China's government cited him along withFranklin Roosevelt andBill Gates as being among the Westerners who had most influenced their country.[16]The Third Wave along with a video documentary based on it became best-sellers in China and were widely distributed to schools.[13] The video's success inspired the marketing of videos on related themes in the late 1990s byInfowars, whose name is derived from the term coined by Toffler in the book. Toffler's influence on Asian thinkers was summed up in an article inDaedalus, published by theAmerican Academy of Arts & Sciences:
Where an earlier generation of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese revolutionaries wanted to re-enact theParis Commune as imagined byKarl Marx, their post-revolutionary successors now want to re-enactSilicon Valley as imagined by Alvin Toffler.[13]
U.S. House SpeakerNewt Gingrich publicly lauded his ideas about the future, and urged members of Congress to read Toffler's book,Creating a New Civilization (1995).[13] Others, such as AOL founderSteve Case, cited Toffler'sThe Third Wave as a formative influence on his thinking,[16] which inspired him to writeThe Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future in 2016. Case said that Toffler was a "real pioneer in helping people, companies and even countries lean into the future."[17][24]
In 1980,Ted Turner foundedCNN, which he said was inspired by Toffler's forecasting the end of the dominance of the three main television networks.[25][26] Turner's company, Turner Broadcasting, published Toffler'sCreating a New Civilization in 1995. Shortly after the book was released, the former Soviet presidentMikhail Gorbachev hosted the Global Governance Conference in San Francisco with the theme,Toward a New Civilization, which was attended by dozens of world figures, including the Tofflers,George H. W. Bush,Margaret Thatcher,Carl Sagan,Abba Eban and Turner with his then-wife, actressJane Fonda.[27]
Mexican billionaireCarlos Slim was influenced by his works, and became a friend of the writer.[13] Global marketerJ.D. Power also said he was inspired by Toffler's works.[28]
Since the 1960s, people had tried to make sense out of the effect of new technologies and social change, a problem which made Toffler's writings widely influential beyond the confines of scientific, economic, and public policy. His works and ideas have been subject to various criticisms, usually with the same argumentation used againstfuturology: that foreseeing the future is nigh impossible.[16]
Techno music pioneerJuan Atkins cites Toffler's phrase "techno rebels" inThe Third Wave as inspiring him to use the word "techno" to describe themusical style he helped to create[29]
MusicianCurtis Mayfield released a disco song called "Future Shock," later covered in an electro version byHerbie Hancock.[16] Science fiction authorJohn Brunner wrote "The Shockwave Rider," from the concept of "future shock."[16]
The nightclub Toffler, inRotterdam, is named after him.
In the song "Victoria" byThe Exponents, the protagonist's daily routine and cultural interests are described: "She's up in time to watch the soap operas, reads Cosmopolitan and Alvin Toffler".
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Accenture, the management consultancy firm, identified Toffler in 2002 as being among the most influential voices in business leaders, along withBill Gates andPeter Drucker.[30] Toffler has also been described in aFinancial Times interview as the "world's most famous futurologist".[31] In 2006, thePeople's Daily classed him among the 50 foreigners who shaped modern China,[32][33] which one U.S. newspaper notes made him a "guru of sorts to world statesmen."[13] Chinese Premier and General SecretaryZhao Ziyang was greatly influenced by Toffler.[34] He convened conferences to discussThe Third Wave in the early 1980s, and in 1985 the book was the No. 2 best seller in China.[7]
AuthorMark Satin characterizes Toffler as an important early influence onradical centrist political thought.[35]
Newt Gingrich became close to the Tofflers in the 1970s and saidThe Third Wave had immensely influenced his own thinking and was "one of the great seminal works of our time."[7]
Toffler has received several prestigious prizes and awards, including theMcKinsey Foundation Book Award for Contributions to Management Literature, Officier deL'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and appointments, including Fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science and theInternational Institute for Strategic Studies.[3]
In 2006, Alvin and Heidi Toffler were recipients ofBrown University's Independent Award.[36]
Toffler was married to Heidi Toffler (born Adelaide Elizabeth Farrell), also a writer and futurist. They lived in theBel Air section of Los Angeles, California, and previously lived inRedding, Connecticut.[36]
The couple's only child, Karen Toffler (1954–2000), died at age 46 after more than a decade suffering fromGuillain–Barré syndrome.[37][38]
Alvin Toffler died in his sleep on June 27, 2016, at his home in Los Angeles.[39] No cause of death was given.[40] He is buried atWestwood Memorial Park.
Alvin Toffler co-wrote his books with his wife Heidi.
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