Future Shock

The maps of the world drawn by the medieval cartographers were so hopelessly inaccurate, so filled with factual error, that they elicit condescending smiles today when almost the entire surface of the earth has been charted. Yet the great explorers could never have discovered the New World without them. Nor could the better, more accurate maps of t

Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society.

I hope, that, unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large, we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.

Similarly, two hours in the life of a four-year-old may be the felt equivalent of twelve hours in the life of her twenty-four-year-old mother. Asking the child to wait two hours for a piece of candy may be the equivalent of asking the mother to wait fourteen hours for a cup of coffee.

In our lifetime the boundaries have burst Today the network of social ties is so tightly woven that the consequences of contemporary events radiate instantaneously around the world.

If acceleration is a new social force, transience is its psychological counterpart,

“future shock” to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

it is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be one hundred percent “right.”

Today the whole world is a fast-breaking story.