Alvin Toffler: Knowledge Technology and Change in Future Society

Abstract

According to Krishan Kumar (2001: vi), the theory of future society has fascinated many Western scholars since long time, as he claims that:Over the past quarter of a century there have been persistent claims that Western societies have entered a new era of their history. While still being undoubtedly industrial, they have undergone, it is suggested, such farreaching changes that they can no longer be considered under the old names and by means of the old theories. Western societies are now in various ways 'post-industrial': 'post-Fordist,' 'post-modern,' even 'post-historical'... Their concentrated largely on the move to a service economy and a 'knowledge society', and the social and political changes that could be expected to follow from this. Those are still with us, but they have joined by others with a more ambitious scope. In these newer we encounter claims that go beyond economics and politics to encompass western, and indeed world, civilization in their entirety. In the information and communication revolution, in the transformation of work and organization in the global economy, and in the crisis of political ideologies and cultural beliefs, these see the signs of a turning point in the evolution of modern societies.It is evident that the futurists' social cannot be separated from the of social change, such as evolutionary, conflict, cyclical, functional, and technological. In fact, discourse on future has explicitly incorporated of social purported by social theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber.1 Their analyses on classical industrialism and the type of society inhabited by most westerners are still discussed in contemporary times in the form of post-industrialism. There are at least three different of postindustrialism - the information society, post-Fordism, and post-modernism, of which sometimes overlap one another.The differences of these three are more on their emphasis, but there are also certain themes and figures recur in each theory, for instance the centrality of information technology which defines the information society idea, is also found in the other two theories. Such are the case of globalization, decentralization and diversity which, according to Kumar, feature prominently in all accounts of the new era. He concedes that ...the information society tend to adopt an optimistic, evolutionary approach that puts all the emphasis on major new clusters of technological innovations. The information revolution is the latest, and by so much the most progressive, step in the sequence of changes that have transformed human society since earliest times - such can be found in Alvin Toffler's conviction on history as a 'succession of rolling waves of change (Kumar 2001: 36-7; Toffler 1981: 13).Indeed, as far as Futures Studies is concerned, the of social futurism - whatever the names - are therefore significant. In other words, these are the grand theories of humanity; and the theory of super- or post-industrial society in fact is a unique Western analysis to study the phenomenon of modernity and how it will continue to define and shape the Western society in particular and the global society in general in the future.Alvin Toffler: A Biographical SketchAlvin Toffler was born in 3 October 1928 in New York. During his adolescence age, he was a Marxist activist, as he recalled ...when I was a Marxist during my late teens and early twenties - now more than a quarter of a century age - I, like many young people, thought I had all the answers. I soon learned that my 'answers' were partial, one-sided, and obsolete (Toffler 1981: 6). In light of his exposure to Marxist socialism which was a social utopia of an ideal society, he developed a special concern about future.In his early adulthood, Toffler worked as an associate editor of Fortune magazine in Washington, and later in the factories (Toffler 1981: 6). …