Toffler on Techno-Books : Authors, Readers Must Brave the New World of Advanced Technology, Writer of ‘Future Shock’ Warns : Reshaping the Future

Alvin Toffler is waving goodby to Gutenberg and hello to the microchip.

Looking ahead at the “next generation of technologies racing towards us,” the author of “Future Shock” foresees dramatic new forms of what we’ve known for 500 years as “the book.”

“People think of books as unchanging, but that’s just not true,” he declares.Instead, Toffler can envision, “far down the line,” a time when books will be read on book-sized video screens, when English translations of foreign language books can be instantaneous and when literacy may not be the essential skill it is today.

“You have to start picturing books as melding into the technology,” he says. “What is a book? It is a technology for delivering information and imagery.”

The Eventual Electronic Book

Phrases like techno-book produce shudders when dropped into literary circles, but Toffler maintains that’s just where they need to be dropped. Speaking recently in Los Angeles to a particularly literary audience, the writers’ group PEN, he elaborated on the coming marriage of the book and the computer, and the eventual arrival of the electronic book--an electronic screen with a dazzling repertoire of interactive abilities.

“Writers are supposed to know their world, and particularly what affects their own vocation, and today that world is not something static,” he explained. “I am always depressed by people who are not interested in anything beyond their own immediate function. Writers need to know what’s changing.”

Tracking what’s changing has placed Toffler in the ranks of the world’s best-known futurists. His 1970 book, “Future Shock,” became a household phrase signifying the stress of change on our personal lives. In it, Toffler maintained that changes in every dimension of life were going to accelerate to such speeds that they would overwhelm people and organizations in high-tech urban societies, leaving them in a state of confusion and disorientation.

While “Future Shock” dealt with the process of change, his 1980 book, “Third Wave,” dealt with the direction of change, chronicling our transition, as Toffler sees it, from an industrial mass society that emphasizes conformity, to a de-massified society and economy that encourage diversity and individualism. Both books have sold millions of copies, been translated into more than 30 languages and continue to be read around the world.

The globe-circling Toffler and his collaborator wife, Heidi, who now live in Los Angeles for part of the year, have a heavy schedule as lecturers and consultants.

“But we consider ourselves primarily writers,” Toffler said in a recent interview. Their talk to the PEN group here was sandwiched between recent talks at the Center for Strategic International Studies in Jakarta, Indonesia, addressing senior management of ITT in Honolulu; and coming visits to Japan, Holland and Venice.

Unlike some futurists who view the printed word as impossibly obsolete, the Tofflers “don’t think reading is a dirty word. Every place we go, we read,” Alvin Toffler said. “On my desk right now are magazines ranging from Industry Week to New Perspectives Quarterly.”

Nevertheless, he added, the future of both reading and writing is changing. Putting on his Buck Rogers hat, he moved a step beyond “Third Wave,” in which he accurately predicted the de-massification of the mass media, the decline of network television and the rise of mini-magazines, newsletters, cable, cassette and computer.

“It was not so long ago that the book was the main carrier of knowledge to a small group of the literate elite,” he said. “Now there are alternative channels for carrying information, there are more different technologies, video fiber optics, satellites.”

This isn’t futuristic, but present reality, he added. “Books on tape are everywhere now, and the irony is that they’ve been lurking around for years, just waiting for the appearance of cheap tape decks in automobiles.” And in the tumultuous publishing industry, big groups are merging and small presses are exploding, giving new definition to the word publisher , he continued.

For example, “we spoke to a hospital group that wanted to publish a book on their star doctors. The advent of desktop publishing suggests to me we will see more books floating into the culture from such ‘para-publishers.’ ”

Moving beyond the present, Toffler tossed out a number of “cultural changes we see coming down the pike.” One of the ideas, almost a fantasy, that has been around for a long time, he said, is the electronic book that is, in effect, a hand-held video screen with rolling text. Book-lover resistance to the concept is massive, he acknowledged.

“People say they like the feel of a book, the fabric, the texture--for bookstore junkies, like us, it forms a holistic experience that is part of the delivery of the information.” Nevertheless, far down the line, he sees an “electronic reader.” “Scientists are working on it now,” he said. “It will be a book-sized electronic screen and you will slip an automated card into it and read it. The microchip might supply all the works of Henry James, for instance.”

But reading is not all, he said. “The reader will be able to adjust the type size (larger or smaller), and change the type font. You can instantly go back and locate the first appearance or the background of any fictional character if you’ve forgotten who he or she is.” (Particularly helpful for Russian novels.)

And that’s just the beginning of possible techno-book hybrids. Other interactive functions, according to Toffler:

“You can increase or decrease the level of vocabulary difficulty. You will be able to call up alternative versions of a novel targeted at different reader groups by age, occupation, geography and sex. You can increase or decrease the violence level or the level of sexual explicitness. You can interact--dictate a story opener or write the next twist of the plot. Basically, I am saying the reader can customize the text.”

This doesn’t mean that traditional books will disappear, he added. “Of course you’ll still be able to get romance novels and Westerns, and other books. All of this is just one more scenario for reading. Another possibility is automatic translation, which means you can read stuff from all over the world not available to you now. This is highly speculative, of course. But the basic point is that technology and culture have never really been separate, but now are increasingly intertwined.

“We are beyond the age of information into the age of cultural technologies.”

Even more important in that area, he thinks, is the impending development of translations that go hand in hand with the satellite transmission of global television.

“Some day, 50 years from now, you can turn on the TV set and watch television news from Nigeria, from Bali, from Finland and hear it in English.

Little Things Mean a Lot

“The satellite dish will be the size of a dinner plate and the electronic unit the size of a pack of cigarettes.”

What does this mean? “It means that no government can keep secrets about the rest of the world. It means we are changing culture.”

Toffler also suggests that eventually we may be rethinking the importance of literacy, “especially as associated with stupidity, and as being job-linked.

“Obviously we think the loss of literacy is terrible, but racing towards us are speech-recognition technologies (you talk to your computer instead of key-punching) that will lessen the link between paycheck and literacy.

“We assume you have to teach everybody to read and write; maybe that assumption will change. I don’t know the outcome, but I do think that we have to re-conceptualize literacy in the light of things like speech technology, reading machines and artificial intelligence.