A while ago I was reading a discussion on Slashdot and someone mentioned a book written in the seventies by Alvin Toffler, called Future Shock. The author of this book has a background in sociology and futurology and in this book he writes about a sort of digital revolution coming up. It’s not as simple as I state it here now. He starts with examples from the past and how everything is becoming over the years more and more complex. And that people everytime have to keep pace with all new things invented. For example, a long while ago – in the Western world – you didn’t have that much choice in personal development, you knew the people in your local town quite good and the most part of your life you had to do the same job and you read the newspaper once a week. Life was relatively simple.

But the last century things have changed a lot. Often people move more easily around, you get to know more people, you can choose what you want to become, you get all kinds of information from television/internet and around you. Life has become relatively more complex. Some people can handle this, some people can’t. This book goes into lots of details about how things changed and how to cope with all the new emerging technologies. The author also argues that perhaps our brain has a certain limit in handling all this information and all this “overflood” of information. It might be that there will be a point in future that a lot of people can’t cope anymore with all complex choices/things around them and actually get into some sort of “Future Shock” state. Alvin tries to give solutions for that in this book.

Anyway, this is a very good and interesting book and I agree with a lot of things he mentions in his book, actually I was happy to read a book that reflected what I’ve sometimes already been wondering about. If you are curious already, you can take a look at a documentary on Youtube.