Conduit or Cage? Mover or Museum?

Abstract

eginning this journey struck fear into my academic heart. B Reading of Margaret Mead’s “prefigurative cultures,” Marshall McLuhan’s “total interdependence,” Kahn and Weiner’s “transition scenarios,” Bertrand de Jouvenel’s “field of uncertainty,” and R. Buckminster Fuller’s holistic and synergistic social theories, one thinks of “Lost in Space” or “Twilight Zone.” Alvin Toffler, a widely read and quoted author and editor of futurist literature, sees the future as a place of experimentation, redesign, and individual responsibility for change which we cannot humanize “until we draw it into our consciousness and probe it with all the intelligence and imagination at our command” (Toffler, 1972,