Publications

- September 1, 2016: Vol. 28, Number 8

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So long, Alvin Toffler (So long, so long)

by Geoffrey Dohrmann

Earlier this year, on June 27, Alvin Toffler died. For those few of you who’ve never heard of him, Toffler released a seminal and oddly prophetic tome called Future Shock in 1970. In that work, he coined the term “information overload” — an experience with which we’ve all become intimately familiar today, 46 years later.

Together with his wife, Heidi, Toffler was the author of several other works that proved to be equally accurate in predicting what he saw as the future, and what we now are experiencing as the present, including The Third Wave, published in 1980, and Powershift, published in 1990.

The underlying theme of Future Shock was humans are adaptable but not very well equipped to handle the immense volume of information, as well as the immense volume of technological and sociological changes, he believed would be coming our way over the following 20 to 50 years. His primary observation was we, as humans, can absorb

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