tribute. It started yesterday in Santa Fe with Beatriz Sarlo
on Monday, at his home in Los Angeles, died Alvin Toffler, author of future shock , the first part of a trilogy that was best seller and predicted how the institutions and countries of the late twentieth century face the tensions and opportunities for change increasingly accelerated. He was 87. The news was confirmed by the firm Toffler Associates, based in Reston, Virginia.
Toffler was a self-educated social scientist and, since the mid-60s, he collaborated with several magazines until he decided to devote five years study the causes that underlay a cultural upheaval that affect the United States and other developed countries. The result of this research was Future Shock (1970), which was published in more than 100 countries, it sold millions of copies and catapulted to international fame Toffler. In the book, bringing together various facts from around the world, the author concluded that the convergence of science, capital and communications was producing a rapid change would end up creating a completely new type of society.
His predictions about the consequences that this change would have on the culture, family, government and society they were amazingly accurate. Among other things, foresaw the development of cloning, proliferation and influence of personal computers and the invention of the Internet and cable television.
“The impetus for this change,” according to his words produced visible and measurable in subjects, victims of broken marriages and families, as well as causing “depressions” who demonstrated in rising crime rates, drug use and social alienation effects. I understand that these phenomena were but psychological disorientation responses and postulated that threatened the very foundations of communities, institutions and nations.
He continued studying these topics in his two successful later books, third wave (1980) and the change of power (1990), always with the help of his wife, Heidi Toffler, who acted as an assistant in the research and figure as coauthor in the following books.
Toffler popularized the phrase “information overload”. His warnings could be rather dark, and drew attention to the fact that countries and institutions that could not follow the pace of change would end in ruin. However, it was generally optimistic. He was among the first authors to recognize that knowledge, not labor or raw materials, would be the most valuable economic resource of developed societies.
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