[staff] Waveriding Into the Future
During Thanksgiving I picked up a book I had always heard about but never read, Alvin Toffler's Future Shock.
“Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”
Future shocks was published just a few months after I was born, in 1970. It's hard not to belittle their sense that their rate of change was fast compared with our own.
A phrase that really caught my eye, right on the first page was the following: "Change is the process by which the future invades our lives."
This is a curious sentence as it inverts time. When he writes "our lives" he is really saying "the present." In other words, change is the process by which the future invades the present (not that the present is invaded by the future). That is to say, the norms of the future first take hold through contrast with previous norms, which we humans experience as change.
Not all change will last into the future, yet anything new that does continue over time must first start as experienced change. And this change, like an invasion, is not something we can stop or avoid. It is a force of nature. This is very McLuhan, the media critic who was most active in the years leading up to FutureShock.
According to McLuhan, you don't start or stop major social forces created through new technology (or media). Rather, you try and predict its flow and influence its overall course. It's not a fatalistic approach, in which humans have no agency, but its more sociology than psychology, looking at overall systems and their dynamics.
This led me to think a lot about Global Kids work exploring formal methods for utilizing the informal learning within digital media.
FutureShock is described as a disease. Nowadays, especially for today's youth, change is the norm. How would people respond if there were no advances in cellphones over the next ten years? Or if MP3 players were the same capacity as back in 2005?
Creating learning in such an environment means predicting the future. It means identifying which new media - and the forms of social relationships they will support or discourage - will become ubiquitous, and beginning the process now to prepare.
If the established digital media of the future is continually invading our present in the form of change, and change is now the norm, how do we pick out which threads to follow?
From the start of the Online Leadership Program we have tried to ride these waves, these FutureShock waves, in reverse. We started with online dialogues, then online games, followed by blogs, virtual worlds and social networks. Along the way we tried a few waves that crashed or plateaued, like podcasts, and got swept by others unaware, such as video sharing through YouTube and photo sharing through Flickr. Other waves we got swept under, unprepared, such as cellphones.
I like this quote from FutureShock as it helps to frame why the OLP is continually looking at the "new". It also helps to identify why riding the front of a wave can be stressful and take such resources.
What it does not do, however, is help us decide which wave to follow? How do we analyze the present from the perspective of the invading future?
