Alvin Toffler is one of the best known specialists in the world for analysing and forecasting changes that we are both living through and going to live through. During the past 40 years, he has announced the end of the industrial era and the arrival of the Information Society.

 

In Le Choc du Futur (The Shock of the Future), 1974, he analyses the consequences of these far too rapid changes experienced in much too short a time frame which disorientate individuals and force them to protect themselves from stress.

 

With La Richesse Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Wealth), his latest work published in 2007 before the crisis, he brings up the concept of ‘prosumer’; a concept which refers to a consumer informed by a producer who, collaboratively, co-constructs his product or service. But this information or this knowledge spreads through space and time at such a speed that there is no longer any more time for reflection or understanding.

 

For Alvin Toffler, one of the reasons for the financial crisis can be found in this report and analysis. Indeed, new financial instruments created overnight, notably structured products, spread out all over the world within the space of a few seconds thus contributing to the little noticeable circulation of the risks and thus the preparation of the bubble.

 

The immediacy of the resulting responses to the instantaneous circulation of information deprived us with a lack of judgment; which requires a certain amount of time.  Nicholas Carr comes to the same conclusion in an article published in the journal The Atlantic in June, ’08:  “Is Google making stupid?” He follows up on the analysis carried out 40 years ago by the sociologist Marshall McLuhan who explained how the media was becoming the message:  support conditions and formats the mind. 

 

Joël de Rosnay in 1995, with L’homme symbiotique (Symbiotic Man), mentioned the inclusion of our brain in a collective brain of which we are merely a few cells:  “This simultaneously hybrid, biological, mechanical and electronic life is coming into being right under our noses; we are all merely cells”. We can even imagine now that the relationship with our iPhone is like a machine-man graft, or perhaps like a prosthetic brain! So, one becomes a simple neurone lost in the universe of ‘cloud computing’, drifting aimlessly from one virtual continent to the next, up to our necks in information, but unable to assimilate it.

 

In response to this state of affairs, the philosopher Paul Virilio, author of Futurisme de l’instant, stop-eject (Futurism of now, stop-eject) refuses to use email which compresses time, flattens out geography and only communicates by mail. He believes that the information age is becoming one of synchronisation, or one of the unique and conditioned mind. With the collective brain – the same goes for everybody – we can say goodbye to differentiation brought about by an individual’s reflections which put problems into a hierarchy and restores them into their context and history so as to give them some sense. Intuition fades and serendipity is put away into the cupboard of fictional stories.

 

And so the debate goes on and, without wanting to be Cassandra again, spreading doom and gloom, the entry of our humanity into the post-industrial age, characterised by information and knowledge, distributed and accessible at any moment, presents us with new challenges. We must always bear in mind that in obtaining new operational knowledge, it is the ability to understand it and integrate it both into a professional organisation and into our own personal lives which must also be developed. This should become our pride to be able to offer each and every one of us judgement peculiar to men of breeding.

 

Our responsibility has been engaged. We cannot finish like Charron, the boatman of the dead, but on the contrary we can most certainly become life guides, beings of wealth who transform knowledge into comprehension and understanding thanks to a variety of learning methods.