Future Shock!

This is from a book ive been reading called 'Future Shock' By Alvin Toffler. Bits and pieces taken. It was popular on facebook, even though the discussion went slightly haywire.

Culture shock has already begun to creep into popular vocabulary. Culture shock is the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on an unprepared visitor. The culture shock phenomenon accounts for much of the bewilderment, frustration, and disorientation that plagues Americans in their dealings with other societies. It causes a breakdown in communication, a misreading of reality, an inability to cope. Yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with a much more serious malady, future shcok.
Future shock is the much more dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow. Future shock will not be found in Index Medicus or in any listing of psychological abnormalities. Yet, unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments. The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality and free floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lay ahead unless we come to understand and treat the disease.
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 ones own society. But its impact is far worse. For most travelers, they have the comforting knowledge that the culture they leave behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not.
Many of us have a vague feeling that things are moving faster.Doctors and executives alike complain that they cannot keep up with the latest developments in their fields. Among many there is an uneasy mood- a suspicion that change is out of control. Not everyone however, shares this anxiety. Millions sleep walk their way through their lives as if nothing had changed since the 1930’s and as if nothing ever will. Living in what is certainly one of the most exciting periods in human history, they attempt to withdraw from it, to block it out, as if it were possible to make it go away by ignoring it. They seek a diplomatic immunity from change.
One sees them everywhere: old people resigned to living out their years, attempting to avoid, at any cost, the intrusions of the new. Already- old people of 35 and 45 are nervous about student riots, sex, or miniskirts, feverishly attempting to persuade themselves that youth after all was always rebellious and what is happening today is no different from the past. Even among young we find an incomprehension of change: students so ignorant of the past that they see nothing unusual about the present.
How do we know that change is accelerating? There is, after all, no absolute way to measure change. In the awesome complexity of the universe, even within any given society, a virtually infinite number of streams of change occur simultaneously. All ‘things’ from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy, are, in reality, not things at all but processes. There is no static point, no nirvana like un-change, against which to measure change. Change is therefore, necessarily relative.
It is also uneven. If all processes occurred at the same speed, or even if they accelerated or decelerated in unison, it would be impossible to observe change. The future, however, invades the present at different speeds. Thus, it becomes possible to compare the speed of different processes as they unfold. We know, for example, that compared with the biological evolution of the species, cultural and social evolution is extremely rapid. We know that some societies transform themselves technologically or economically more rapidly than others. We also know that different sectors from the same society exhibit different rates of change. It is precisely the unevenness of change that makes it measurable.
We need however a yardstick that makes it possible to compare highly diverse processes and this yardstick is time. Without time, change has no meaning. And without change time would stop. Time can be conceived as the intervals during which events occur. Time is the currency of exchange that makes it possible to compare the rates at which very different processes play themselves out.
Given the unevenness of change and armed with this yardstick, we still face exhausting difficulties in measuring change. When we speak of the rate of change, we refer to the number of events crowded into an arbitary fixed interval of time. Thus, we need to define the events. We need to select our intervals with precision. We need to be able about the conclusions we draw from the differences we observe. Moreover, in the measurement of change, we are today far more advanced with respect to physical processes than social processes. We know, for example, how to measure the rate at which blood flows through the body than the rate at which a rumor flows through society.
Even with these qualifications, however there is widespread agreement, reaching from historians and archaelogists all across the spectrum to scientists, sociologists, economists and psychologists, that, many social processes are speeding up- strikingly, even spectacularly.