Future Shock

Chapter 4 THINGS: THE THROW-AWAY SOCIETY

"Barbie," a twelve-inch plastic teen-ager, is the best-known and best-selling doll in history. Since its introduction in 1959, the Barbie doll population of the world has grown to 12,000,000 – more than the human population of Los Angeles or London or Paris. Little girls adore Barbie because she is highly realistic and eminently dress-upable. Mattel, Inc., makers of Barbie, also sells a complete wardrobe for her, including clothes for ordinary daytime wear, clothes for formal party wear, clothes for swimming and skiing.

Recently Mattel announced a new improved Barbie doll. The new version has a slimmer figure, "real" eyelashes, and a twist-and-turn waist that makes her more humanoid than ever. Moreover, Mattel announced that, for the first time, any young lady wishing to purchase a new Barbie would receive a trade-in allowance for her old one.

What Mattel did not announce was that by trading in her old doll for a technologically improved model, the little girl of today, citizen of tomorrow's super-industrial world, would learn a fundamental lesson about the new society: that man's relationships with things are increasingly temporary.

The ocean of man-made physical objects that surrounds us is set within a larger ocean of natural objects. But increasingly, it is the technologically produced environment that matters for the individual. The texture of plastic or concrete, the iridescent glisten of an automobile under a streetlight, the staggering vision of a cityscape seen from the window of a jet – these are the intimate realities of his existence. Man-made things enter into and color his consciousness. Their number is expanding with explosive force, both absolutely and relative to the natural environment. This will be even more true in super-industrial society than it is today.

Anti-materialists tend to deride the importance of "things." Yet things are highly significant, not merely because of their functional utility, but also because of their psychological impact. We develop relationships with things. Things affect our sense of continuity or discontinuity. They play a role in the structure of situations and the foreshortening of our relationships with things accelerates the pace of life.

Moreover, our attitudes toward things reflect basic value judgments. Nothing could be more dramatic than the difference between the new breed of little girls who cheerfully turn in their Barbies for the new improved model and those who, like their mothers and grandmothers before them, clutch lingeringly and lovingly to the same doll until it disintegrates from sheer age. In this difference lies the contrast between past and future, between societies based on permanence, and the new, fast-forming society based on transience.

That man-thing relationships are growing more and more temporary may be illustrated by examining the culture surrounding the little girl who trades in her doll. This child soon learns that Barbie dolls are by no means the only physical objects that pass into and out of her young life at a rapid clip. Diapers, bibs, paper napkins, Kleenex, towels, non-returnable soda bottles – all are used up quickly in her home and ruthlessly eliminated. Corn muffins come in baking tins that are thrown away after one use. Spinach is encased in plastic sacks that can be dropped into a pan of boiling water for heating, and then thrown away. TV dinners are cooked and often served on throw-away trays. Her home is a large processing machine through which objects flow, entering and leaving, at a faster and faster rate of speed. From birth on, she is inextricably embedded in a throw-away culture.

The idea of using a product once or for a brief period and then replacing it, runs counter to the grain of societies or individuals steeped in a heritage of poverty. Not long ago Uriel Rone, a market researcher for the French advertising agency Publicis, told me: "The French housewife is not used to disposable products. She likes to keep things, even old things, rather than throw them away. We represented one company that wanted to introduce a kind of plastic throw-away curtain. We did a marketing study for them and found the resistance too strong." This resistance, however, is dying all over the developed world.

Thus a writer, Edward Maze, has pointed out that many Americans visiting Sweden in the early 1950's were astounded by its cleanliness. "We were almost awed by the fact that there were no beer and soft drink bottles by the roadsides, as, much to our shame, there were in America. But by the 1960's, lo and behold, bottles were suddenly blooming along Swedish highways ... What happened? Sweden had become a buy, use and throw-away society, following the American pattern." In Japan today throw-away tissues are so universal that cloth handkerchiefs are regarded as old fashioned, not to say unsanitary. In England for sixpence one may buy a "Dentamatic throw-away toothbrush" which comes already coated with toothpaste for its one-time use. And even in France, disposable cigarette lighters are commonplace. From cardboard milk containers to the rockets that power space vehicles, products created for short-term or one-time use are becoming more numerous and crucial to our way of life.

The recent introduction of paper and quasi-paper clothing carried the trend toward disposability a step further. Fashionable boutiques and working-class clothing stores have sprouted whole departments devoted to gaily colored and imaginatively designed paper apparel. Fashion magazines display breathtakingly sumptuous gowns, coats, pajamas, even wedding dresses made of paper. The bride pictured in one of these wears a long white train of lace-like paper that, the caption writer notes, will make "great kitchen curtains" after the ceremony.

Paper clothes are particularly suitable for children. Writes one fashion expert: "Little girls will soon be able to spill ice cream, draw pictures and make cutouts on their clothes while their mothers smile benignly at their creativity." And for adults who want to express their own creativity, there is even a "paint-yourself-dress" complete with brushes. Price: $2.00.

Price, of course, is a critical factor behind the paper explosion. Thus a department store features simple A-line dresses made of what it calls "devil-may-care cellulose fiber and nylon." At $1.29 each, it is almost cheaper for the consumer to buy and discard a new one than to send an ordinary dress to the cleaners. Soon it will be. But more than economics is involved, for the extension of the throw-away culture has important psychological consequences.

We develop a throw-away mentality to match our throw-away products. This mentality produces, among other things, a set of radically altered values with respect to property. But the spread of disposability through the society also implies decreased durations in man-thing relationships. Instead of being linked with a single object over a relatively long span of time, we are linked for brief periods with the succession of objects that supplant it.

The shift toward transience is even manifest in architecture – precisely that part of the physical environment that in the past contributed mostly heavily to man's sense of permanence. The child who trades in her Barbie doll cannot but also recognize the transience of buildings and other large structures that surround her. We raze landmarks. We tear down whole streets and cities and put new ones up at a mind-numbing rate.

"The average age of dwellings has steadily declined," writes E. F. Carter of the Stanford Research Institute, "from being virtually infinite in the days of caves to ... approximately a hundred years for houses built in United States colonial days, to about forty years at present." And Michael Wood, an English writer comments: The American "... made his world yesterday, and he knows exactly how fragile, how shifting it is. Buildings in New York literally disappear overnight, and the face of a city can change completely in a year."

Novelist Louis Auchincloss complains angrily that "The horror of living in New York is living in a city without a history ... All eight of my great-grandparents lived in the city ... and only one of the houses they lived in ... is still standing. That's what I mean by the vanishing past." Less patrician New Yorkers, whose ancestors landed in America more recently, arriving there from the barrios of Puerto Rico, the villages of Eastern Europe or the plantations of the South, might voice their feelings quite differently. Yet the "Vanishing past" is a real phenomenon, and it is likely to become far more widespread, engulfing even many of the history-drenched cities of Europe.

Buckminster Fuller, the designer-philosopher, once described New York as a "continual evolutionary process of evacuations, demolitions, removals, temporarily vacant lots, new installations and repeat. This process is identical in principle to the annual rotation of crops in farm acreage – plowing, planting the new seed, harvesting, plowing under, and putting in another type of crop ... Most people look upon the building operations blocking New York's streets ... as temporary annoyances, soon to disappear in a static peace. They still think of permanence as normal, a hangover from the Newtonian view of the universe. But those who have lived in and with New York since the beginning of the century have literally experienced living with Einsteinian relativity."

That children, in fact, internalize this "Einsteinian relativity" was brought home to me forcibly by a personal experience. Some time ago my wife sent my daughter, then twelve, to a supermarket a few blocks from our Manhattan apartment. Our little girl had been there only once or twice before. Half an hour later she returned perplexed. "It must have been torn down," she said, "I couldn't find it." It hadn't been. New to the neighborhood, Karen had merely looked on the wrong block. But she is a child of the Age of Transience, and her immediate assumption – that the building had been razed and replaced – was a natural one for a twelve-year-old growing up in the United States at this time. Such an idea would probably never have occurred to a child faced with a similar predicament even half a century ago. The physical environment was far more durable, our links with it less transient.

In the past, permanence was the ideal. Whether engaged in handcrafting a pair of boots or in constructing a cathedral, all man's creative and productive energies went toward maximizing the durability of the product. Man built to last. He had to. As long as the society around him was relatively unchanging each object had clearly defined functions, and economic logic dictated the policy of permanence. Even if they had to be repaired now and then, the boots that cost fifty dollars and lasted ten years were less expensive than those that cost ten dollars and lasted only a year.

As the general rate of change in society accelerates, however, the economics of permanence are – and must be – replaced by the economics of transience.

First, advancing technology tends to lower the costs of manufacture much more rapidly than the costs of repair work. The one is automated, the other remains largely a handcraft operation. This means that it often becomes cheaper to replace than to repair. It is economically sensible to build cheap, unrepairable, throwaway objects, even though they may not last as long as repairable objects.

Second, advancing technology makes it possible to improve the object as time goes by. The second generation computer is better than the first, and the third is better than the second. Since we can anticipate further technological advance, more improvements coming at ever shorter intervals, it often makes hard economic sense to build for the short term rather than the long. David Lewis, an architect and city planner with Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh, tells of certain apartment houses in Miami that are torn down after only ten years of existence. Improved air conditioning systems in newer buildings hurt the rentability of these "old" buildings. All things considered, it becomes cheaper to tear down the ten-year-old buildings than to modify them.

Third, as change accelerates and reaches into more and more remote corners of the society, uncertainty about future needs increases. Recognizing the inevitability of change, but unsure as to the demands it will impose on us, we hesitate to commit large resources for rigidly fixed objects intended to serve unchanging purposes. Avoiding commitment to fixed forms and functions, we build for short-term use or, alternatively, attempt to make the product itself adaptable. We "play it cool" technologically.

The rise of disposability – the spread of the throw-away culture – is a response to these powerful pressures. As change accelerates and complexities multiply, we can expect to see further extensions of the principle of disposability, further curtailment of man's relationships with things.

There are other responses besides disposability that also lead to the same psychological effect. For example, we are now witnessing the wholesale creation of objects designed to serve a series of short-term purposes instead of a single one. These are not throw-away items. They are usually too big and expensive to discard. But they are so constructed that they may be dismantled, if necessary, and relocated after each use.

Thus the board of education of Los Angeles has decided that fully 25 percent of that city's classrooms will, in the future, be temporary structures that can be moved around as needed. Every major United States school district today uses some temporary classrooms. More are on the way. Indeed, temporary classrooms are to the school construction industry what paper dresses are to the clothing industry – a foretaste of the future.

The purpose of temporary classrooms is to help school systems cope with rapidly shifting population densities. But temporary classrooms, like disposable clothes, imply manthing relationships of shorter duration than in the past. Thus the temporary classroom teaches something even in the absence of a teacher. Like the Barbie doll, it provides the child with a vivid lesson in the impermanence of her surroundings. No sooner does the child internalize a thorough knowledge of the classroom – the way it fits into the surrounding architecture, the way the desks feel on a hot day, the way sound reverberates in it, all the subtle smells and textures that individualize any structure and lend it reality – than the structure itself may be physically removed from her environment to serve other children in another place.

Nor are mobile classrooms a purely American phenomenon. In England, architect Cedric Price has designed what he calls a "thinkbelt" – an entirely mobile university intended to serve 20,000 students in North Staffordshire. "It will," he says, "rely on temporary buildings rather than permanent ones." It will make "great use of mobile and variable physical enclosures" – classrooms, for example, built inside railroad cars so that they may be shunted anywhere along the four-mile campus.

Geodesic domes to house expositions, air-inflated plastic bubbles for use as command posts or construction headquarters, a whole array of pick-up-and-move temporary structures are flowing from the drawing boards of engineers and architects. In New York City, the Department of Parks has decided to build twelve "portable playgrounds" – small, temporary playgrounds to be installed on vacant city lots until other uses are found for the land, at which time the playgrounds can be dismounted and moved elsewhere. There was a time when a playground was a reasonably permanent fixture in a neighborhood, when one's children and even, perhaps, one's children's children might, each in their turn, experience it in roughly the same way. Super-industrial playgrounds, however, refuse to stay put. They are temporary by design.

The reduction in the duration of man-thing relationships brought about by the proliferation of throw-away items and temporary structures is further intensified by the rapid spread of "modularism." Modularism may be defined as the attempt to lend whole structures greater permanence at the cost of making their sub-structures less permanent. Thus Cedric Price's "thinkbelt" plan proposes that faculty and student apartments consist of pressed-steel modules that can be hoisted by crane and plugged into building frames. The frames become the only relatively permanent parts of the structure. The apartment modules can be shifted around as needed, or even, in theory, completely discarded and replaced.

It needs to be emphasized here that the distinction between disposability and mobility is, from the point of view of the duration of relationships, a thin one. Even when modules are not discarded, but merely rearranged, the result is a new configuration, a new entity. It is as if one physical structure had, in reality, been discarded and a new one created, even though some or all of the components remain the same.

Even many supposedly "permanent" buildings today are constructed on a modular plan so that interior walls and partitions may be shifted at will to form new enclosure patterns inside. The mobile partition, indeed, might well serve as a symbol of the transient society. One scarcely ever enters a large office today without tripping over a crew of workers busily moving desks and rearranging interior space by reorganizing the partitions. In Sweden a new triumph of modularism has recently been achieved: in a model apartment house in Uppsala all walls and closets are movable. The tenant needs only a screwdriver to transform his living space completely, to create, in effect, a new apartment.

Sometimes, however, modularity is directly combined with disposability. The simple, ubiquitous ballpoint pen provides an example. The original goose-quill pen had a long life expectancy. Barring accident, it lasted a long time and could be resharpened (i.e., repaired) from time to time to extend its life. The fountain pen, however, was a great technological advance because it gave the user mobility. It provided a writing tool that carried its own inkwell, thus vastly increasing its range of usefulness. The invention of the ball point consolidated and extended this advance. It provided a pen that carried its own ink supply, but that, in addition, was so cheap it could be thrown away when empty. The first truly disposable pen-and-ink combination had been created.

We have, however, not yet outgrown the psychological attitudes that accompany scarcity. Thus there are still many people today who feel a twinge of guilt at discarding even a spent ball-point pen. The response of the pen industry to this psychological reality was the creation of a ball-point pen built on the modular principle – an outer frame that the user could keep, and an inner ink module or cartridge that he could throw away and replace. By making the ink cartridge expendable, the whole structure is given extended life at the expense of the sub-structure.

There are, however, more parts than wholes. And whether he is shifting them around to create new wholes or discarding and replacing them, the user experiences a more rapid through-put of things through his life, a generalized decline in the average duration of his relationship with things. The result is a new fluidity, mobility and transience.

One of the most extreme examples of architecture designed to embody these principles was the plan put forward by the English theatrical producer Joan Littlewood with the help of Frank Newby, a structural engineer, Gordon Pask, a systems consultant, and Cedric Price, the "thinkbelt" architect.

Miss Littlewood wanted a theater in which versatility might be maximized, in which she might present anything from an ordinary play to a political rally, from a performance of dance to a wrestling match – preferably all at the same time. She wanted, as the critic Reyner Banham has put it, a "zone of total probability." The result was a fantastic plan for "The Fun Palace," otherwise known as the "First Giant Space Mobile in the World." The plan calls not for a multi-purpose building, but for what is, in effect, a larger than life-sized Erector Set, a collection of modular parts that can be hung together in an almost infinite variety of ways. More or less "permanent" vertical towers house various services – such as toilets and electronic control units – and are topped by gantry cranes that lift the modules into position and assemble them to form any temporary configuration desired. After an evening's entertainment, the cranes come out, disassemble the auditoria, exhibition halls and restaurants, and store them away.

Here is the way Reyner Banham describes it: "... the Fun Palace is a piece of ten-yearexpendable urban equipment ... Day by day this giant neo-Futurist machine will stir and reshuffle its movable parts – walls and floors, ramps and walks, steerable escalators, seating and roofing, stages and movie screens, lighting and sound systems – sometimes with only a small part walled in, but with the public poking about the exposed walks and stairs, pressing buttons to make things happen themselves.

"This, when it happens (and it is on the cards that it will, somewhere, soon) will be indeterminacy raised to a new power: no permanent monumental interior space or heroic silhouette against the sky will survive for posterity ... For the only permanently visible elements of the Fun Palace will be the 'life-support' structure on which the transient architecture will be parasitic."

Proponents of what has become known as "plug-in" or "clip-on" architecture have designed whole cities based on the idea of "transient architecture." Extending the concepts on which the Fun Palace plan is based, they propose the construction of different types of modules which would be assigned different life expectancies. Thus the core of a "building" might be engineered to last twenty-five years, while the plug-in room modules are built to last only three years. Letting their imaginations roam still further, they have conjured up mobile skyscrapers that rest not on fixed foundations but on gigantic "ground effect" machines or hovercraft. The ultimate is an entire urban agglomeration freed of fixed position, floating on a cushion of air, powered by nuclear energy, and changing its inner shape even more rapidly than New York does today.

Whether or not precisely these visions become reality, the fact is that society is moving in this direction. The extension of the throw-away culture, the creation of more and more temporary structures, the spread of modularism are proceeding apace, and they all conspire toward the same psychological end: the ephemeralization of man's links with the things that surround him.

Still another development is drastically altering the man-thing nexus: the rental revolution. The spread of rentalism, a characteristic of societies rocketing toward super-industrialism, is intimately connected with all the tendencies described above. The link between Hertz cars, disposable diapers, and Joan Littlewood's "Fun Palace," may seem obscure at first glance, but closer inspection reveals strong inner similarities. For rentalism, too, intensifies transience.

During the depression, when millions were jobless and homeless, the yearning for a home of one's own was one of the most powerful economic motivations in capitalist societies. In the United States today the desire for home ownership is still strong, but ever since the end of World War II the percentage of new housing devoted to rental apartments has been soaring. As late as 1955 apartments accounted for only 8 percent of new housing starts. By 1961 it reached 24 percent. By 1969, for the first time in the United States, more building permits were being issued for apartment construction than for private homes. Apartment living, for a variety of reasons, is "in." It is particularly in among young people who, in the words of MIT Professor Burnham Kelly, want "minimum-involvement housing."

Minimum involvement is precisely what the user of a throw-away product gets for his money. It is also what temporary structures and modular components foster. Commitments to apartments are, almost by definition, shorter term commitments than those made by a homeowner to his home. The trend toward residential renting thus underscores the tendency toward ever-briefer relationships with the physical environment. (It might be noted that millions of American home "owners," having purchased a home with a down payment of 10 percent or less, are actually no more than surrogate owners for banks and other lending institutions. For these families, the monthly check to the bank is no different from the rent check to the landlord. Their ownership is essentially metaphorical, and since they lack a strong financial stake in their property, they also frequently lack the homeowner's strong psychological commitment to it.)

More striking than this, however, has been the recent upsurge of rental activity in fields in which it was all but unknown in the past. David Riesman has written: "People are fond of their cars; they like to talk about them – something that comes out very clearly in interviews – but their affection for any one in particular rarely reaches enough intensity to become long-term." This is reflected in the fact that the average car owner in the United States keeps his automobile only three and a half years; many of the more affluent trade in their automobiles every year or two. In turn, this accounts for the existence of a twentybillion-dollar used car business in the United States. It was the automotive industry that first succeeded in destroying the traditional notion that a major purchase had to be a permanent commitment. The annual model changeover, high-powered advertising, backed by the industry's willingness to offer trade-in allowances, made the purchase of a new (or new used) car a relatively frequent occurrence in the life of the average American male. In effect, it shortened the interval between purchases, thereby shortening the duration of the relationship between an owner and any one vehicle.

In recent years, however, a spectacular new force has emerged to challenge many of the most deeply ingrained patterns of the automotive industry. This is the auto rental business. Today in the United States millions of motorists rent automobiles from time to time for periods of a few hours up to several months. Many big-city dwellers, especially in New York where parking is a nightmare, refuse to own a car, preferring to rent one for weekend trips to the country, or even for in-town trips that are inconvenient by public transit. Autos today can be rented with a minimum of red tape at almost any US airport, railroad station or hotel.

Moreover, Americans have carried the rental habit abroad with them. Nearly half a million of them rent cars while overseas each year. This figure is expected to rise to nearly a million by 1975, and the big American rental companies, operating now in some fifty countries around the globe, are beginning to run into foreign competitors. Simultaneously, European motorists are beginning to emulate the Americans. A cartoon in Paris Match shows a creature from outer space standing next to his flying saucer and asking a gendarme where he can rent an auto. The idea is catching on.

The rise of auto rentals, meanwhile, has been paralleled by the emergence in the United States of a new kind of general store – one which sells nothing but rents everything. There are now some 9000 such stores in the United States with an annual rental volume on the order of one billion dollars and a growth rate of from 10 to 20 percent per year. Virtually 50 percent of these stores were not in business five years ago. Today, there is scarcely a product that cannot be rented, from ladders and lawn equipment to mink coats and originals Rouaults.

In Los Angeles, rental firms provide live shrubs and trees for real estate developers who wish to landscape model homes temporarily. "Plants enhance – rent living plants," says the sign on the side of a truck in San Francisco. In Philadelphia one may rent shirts. Elsewhere, Americans now rent everything from gowns, crutches, jewels, TV sets, camping equipment, air conditioners, wheelchairs, linens, skis, tape recorders, champagne fountains, and silverware. A West Coast men's club rented a human skeleton for a demonstration, and an ad in the Wall Street Journal even urges: "Rent-a-Cow."

Not long ago the Swedish women's magazine Svensk Damtidning ran a five-part series about the world of 1985. Among other things, it suggested that by then "we will sleep in built-in sleeping furniture with buttons for when we eat breakfast or read, or else we will rent a bed at the same place that we rent the table and the paintings and the washing machine."

Impatient Americans are not waiting for 1985. Indeed, one of the most significant aspects of the booming rental business is the rise of furniture rental. Some manufacturers and many rental firms will now furnish entire small apartments for as little as twenty to fifty dollars per month, down to the drapes, rugs and ashtrays. "You arrive in town in the morning," says one airline stewardess, "and by evening you've got a swinging pad." Says a Canadian transferred to New York: "It's new, it's colorful, and I don't have to worry about carting it all over the world when I'm transferred."

William James once wrote that "lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being." The rise of rentalism is a move away from lives based on having and it reflects the increase in doing and being. If the people of the future live faster than the people of the past, they must also be far more flexible. They are like broken field runners – and it is hard to sidestep a tackle when loaded down with possessions. They want the advantage of affluence and the latest that technology has to offer, but not the responsibility that has, until now, accompanied the accumulation of possessions. They recognize that to survive among the uncertainties of rapid change they must learn to travel light.

Whatever its broader effects, however, rentalism shortens still further the duration of the relationships between man and the things that he uses. This is made clear by asking a simple question: How many cars – rented, borrowed or owned – pass through the hands of the average American male in a lifetime? The answer for car owners might be in the range of twenty to fifty. For active car renters, however, the figure might run as high as 200 or more. While the buyer's average relationship with a particular vehicle extends over many months or years, the renter's average link with any one particular car is extremely short-lived.

Renting has the net effect of multiplying the number of people with successive relationships to the same object, and thus reducing, on average, the duration of such relationships. When we extend this principle to a very wide range of products, it becomes clear that the rise of rentalism parallels and reinforces the impact of throw-away items, temporary structures and modularism.

It is important here to turn for a moment to the notion of obsolescence. For the fear of product obsolescence drives businessmen to innovation at the same time that it impels the consumer toward rented, disposable or temporary products. The very idea of obsolescence is disturbing to people bred on the ideal of permanence, and it is particularly upsetting when thought to be planned. Planned obsolescence has been the target of so much recent social criticism that the unwary reader might be led to regard it as the primary or even exclusive cause of the trend toward shorter relational durations.

There is no doubt that some businessmen conspire to shorten the useful life of their products in order to guarantee replacement sales. There is, similarly, no doubt that many of the annual model changes with which American (and other) consumers are increasingly familiar are not technologically substantive. Detroit's autos today deliver no more mileage per gallon of gasoline than they did ten model changes back, and the oil companies, for all the additives about which they boast, still put a turtle, not a tiger, in the tank. Moreover, it is incontestable that Madison Avenue frequently exaggerates the importance of new features and encourages consumers to dispose of partially worn-out goods to make way for the new.

It is therefore true that the consumer is sometimes caught in a carefully engineered trap – an old product whose death has been deliberately hastened by its manufacturer, and the simultaneous appearance of a "new improved" model advertised as the latest heaven-sent triumph of advanced technology.

Nevertheless, these reasons by themselves cannot begin to account for the fantastic rate of turnover of the products in our lives. Rapid obsolescence is an integral part of the entire accelerative process – a process involving not merely the life span of sparkplugs, but of whole societies. Bound up with the rise of science and the speed-up in the acquisition of knowledge, this historic process can hardly be attributed to the evil design of a few contemporary hucksters.

Clearly, obsolescence occurs with or without "planning." With respect to things, obsolescence occurs under three conditions. It occurs when a product literally deteriorates to the point at which it can no longer fulfill its functions – bearings burn out, fabrics tear, pipes rust. Assuming the same functions still need to be performed for the consumer, the failure of a product to perform these functions marks the point at which its replacement is required. This is obsolescence due to functional failure.

Obsolescence also occurs when some new product arrives on the scene to perform these functions more effectively than the old product could. The new antibiotics do a more effective job of curing infection than the old. The new computers are infinitely faster and cheaper to operate than the antique models of the early 1960's. This is obsolescence due to substantive technological advance.

But obsolescence also occurs when the needs of the consumer change, when the functions to be performed by the product are themselves altered. These needs are not as simply described as the critics of planned obsolescence sometimes assume. An object, whether a car or a can opener, may be evaluated along many different parameters. A car, for example, is more than a conveyance. It is an expression of the personality of the user, a symbol of status, a source of that pleasure associated with speed, a source of a wide variety of sensory stimuli – tactile, olfactory, visual, etc. The satisfaction a consumer gains from such factors may, depending upon his values, outweigh the satisfaction he might receive from improved gas consumption or pickup power.

The traditional notion that each object has a single easily definable function clashes with all that we now know about human psychology, about the role of values in decisionmaking, and with ordinary common sense as well. All products are multi-functional.

An excellent illustration of this occurred not long ago when I watched a little boy purchase half a dozen pink erasers at a little stationery store. Curious as to why he wanted so many of them, I picked one up for closer examination. "Do they erase well?" I asked the boy. "I don't know,." he said, "but they sure smell good!" And, indeed, they did. They had been heavily perfumed by the Japanese manufacturer perhaps to mask an unpleasant chemical odor. In short, the needs filled by products vary by purchaser and through time.

In a society of scarcity, needs are relatively universal and unchanging because they are starkly related to the "gut" functions. As affluence rises, however, human needs become less directly linked to biological survival and more highly individuated. Moreover, in a society caught up in complex, high-speed change, the needs of the individual – which arise out of his interaction with the external environment – also change at relatively high speed. The more rapidly changing the society, the more temporary the needs. Given the general affluence of the new society, he can indulge many of these short-term needs.

Often, without even having a clear idea of what needs he wants served, the consumer has a vague feeling that he wants a change. Advertising encourages and capitalizes on this feeling, but it can hardly be credited with having created it single-handedly. The tendency toward shorter relational durations is thus built more deeply into the social structure than arguments over planned obsolescence or the manipulative effectiveness of Madison Avenue would suggest.

The rapidity with which consumers' needs shift is reflected in the alacrity with which buyers abandon product and brand loyalty. If Assistant Attorney General Donald F. Turner, a leading critic of advertising, is correct, one of the primary purposes of advertising is to create "durable preferences." If so, it is failing, for brand-switching is so frequent and common that it has become, in the words of one food industry publication, "one of the national advertiser's major headaches."

Many brands drop out of existence. Among brands that continue to exist there is a continual reshuffling of position. According to Henry M. Schachte, "In almost no major consumer goods category ... is there a brand on top today which held that position ten years ago." Thus among ten leading American cigarettes, only one, Pall Mall, maintained in 1966 the same share of the market that it held in 1956. Camels plunged from 18 to 9 percent of the market; Lucky Strike declined even more sharply, from 14 to 6 percent. Other brands moved up, with Salem, for example, rising from 1 to 9 percent. Additional fluctuations have occurred since this survey.

However insignificant these shifts may be from the long-run view of the historian, this continual shuffling and reshuffling, influenced but not independently controlled by advertising, introduces into the short-run, everyday life of the individual a dazzling dynamism. It heightens still further the sense of speed, turmoil and impermanence in society.

Fast-shifting preferences, flowing out of and interacting with high-speed technological change, not only lead to frequent changes in the popularity of products and brands, but also shorten the life cycle of products. Automation expert John Diebold never wearies of pointing out to businessmen that they must begin to think in terms of shorter life spans for their goods. Smith Brothers' Cough Drops, Calumet Baking Soda and Ivory Soap, have become American institutions by virtue of their long reign in the market place. In the days ahead, he suggests, few products will enjoy such longevity. Every consumer has had the experience of going to the supermarket or department store to replace some item, only to find that he cannot locate the same brand or product. In 1966 some 7000 new products turned up in American supermarkets. Fully 55 percent of all the items now sold there did not exist ten years ago. And of the products available then, 42 percent have faded away altogether. Each year the process repeats itself in more extreme form. Thus 1968 saw 9,500 new items in the consumer packaged-goods field alone, with only one in five meeting its sales target. A silent but rapid attrition kills off the old, and new products sweep in like a ride. "Products that used to sell for twenty-five years," writes economist Robert Theobald, "now often count on no more than five. In the volatile pharmaceutical and electronic fields the period is often as short as six months." As the pace of change accelerates further, corporations may create new products knowing full well that they will remain on the market for only a matter of a few weeks.

Here, too, the present already provides us with a foretaste of the future. It lies in an unexpected quarter: the fads now sweeping over the high technology societies in wave after wave. In the past few years alone, in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, we have witnessed the sudden rise or collapse in popularity of "Bardot hairdos," the "Cleopatra look," James Bond, and Batman, not to speak of Tiffany lampshades, Super-Balls, iron crosses, pop sunglasses, badges and buttons with protest slogans or pornographic jokes, posters of Allen Ginsberg or Humphrey Bogart, false eyelashes, and innumerable other gimcracks and oddities that reflect – are tuned into – the rapidly changing pop culture.

Backed by mass media promotion and sophisticated marketing, such fads now explode on the scene virtually overnight – and vanish just as quickly. Sophisticates in the fad business prepare in advance for shorter and shorter product life cycles. Thus, there is in San Gabriel, California, a company entitled, with a kind of cornball relish, Wham-O Manufacturing Company. Wham-O specializes in fad products, having introduced the hula hoop in the fifties and the so-called Super-Ball more recently. The latter – a high-bouncing rubber ball – quickly became so popular with adults as well as children that astonished visitors saw several of them bouncing merrily on the floor of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Wall Street executives gave them away to friends and one high broadcasting official complained that "All our executives are out in the halls with their Super-Balls." Wham-O, and other companies like it, however, are not disconcerted when sudden death overtakes their product; they anticipate it. They are specialists in the design and manufacture of "temporary" products.

The fact that fads are generated artificially, to a large extent, merely underscores their significance. Even engineered fads are not new to history. But never before have they come fleeting across the consciousness in such rapid-fire profusion, and never has there been such smooth coordination between those who originate the fad, mass media eager to popularize it, and companies geared for its instantaneous exploitation.

A well-oiled machinery for the creation and diffusion of fads is now an entrenched part of the modern economy. Its methods will increasingly be adopted by others as they recognize the inevitability of the ever-shorter product cycle. The line between "fad" and ordinary product will progressively blur. We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs.

The turnover of things in our lives thus grows even more frenetic. We face a rising flood of throw-away items, impermanent architecture, mobile and modular products, rented goods and commodities designed for almost instant death. From all these directions, strong pressures converge toward the same end: the inescapable ephemeralization of the man-thing relationship.

The foreshortening of our ties with the physical environment, the stepped-up turnover of things, however, is only a small part of a much larger context. Let us, therefore, press ahead in our exploration of life in high transience society.

Chapter 5 PLACES: THE NEW NOMADS

Every Friday afternoon at 4:30, a tall, graying Wall Street executive named Bruce Robe stuffs a mass of papers into his black leather briefcase, takes his coat off the rack outside his office, and departs. The routine has been the same for more than three years. First, he rides the elevator twenty-nine floors down to street level. Next he strides for ten minutes through crowded streets to the Wall Street Heliport. There he boards a helicopter which deposits him, eight minutes later, at John F. Kennedy Airport. Transferring to a Trans-World Airlines jet, he settles down for supper, as the giant craft swings out over the Atlantic, then banks and heads west. One hour and ten minutes later, barring delay, he steps briskly out of the terminal building at the airport in Columbus, Ohio, and enters a waiting automobile. In thirty more minutes he reaches his destination: he is home.

Four nights a week Robe lives at a hotel in Manhattan. The other three he spends with his wife and children in Columbus, 500 miles away. Claiming the best of two worlds, a job in the frenetic financial center of America and a family life in the comparatively tranquil Midwest countryside, he shuttles back and forth some 50,000 miles a year.

The Robe case is unusual – but not that unusual. In Califomia, ranch owners fly as much as 120 miles every morning from their homes on the Pacific Coast or in the San Bernardino Valley to visit their ranches in the Imperial Valley, and then fly back home again at night. One Pennsylvania teen-ager, son of a peripatetic engineer, jets regularly to an orthodontist in Frankfurt, Germany. A University of Chicago philosopher, Dr. Richard McKeon, commuted 1000 miles each way once a week for an entire semester in order to teach a series of classes at the New School for Social Research in New York. A young San Franciscoan and his girlfriend in Honolulu see each other every weekend, taking turns at crossing 2000 miles of Pacific Ocean. And at least one New England matron regularly swoops down on New York to visit her hairdresser.

Never in history has distance meant less. Never have man's relationships with place been more numerous, fragile and temporary. Throughout the advanced technological societies, and particularly among those I have characterized as "the people of the future," commuting, traveling, and regularly relocating one's family have become second nature. Figuratively, we "use up" places and dispose of them in much the same that we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are.

In 1914, according to Buckminster Fuller, the typical American averaged about 1,640 miles per year of total travel, counting some 1,300 miles of just plain everyday walking to and fro. This meant that he traveled only about 340 miles per year with the aid of horse or mechanical means. Using this 1,640 figure as a base, it is possible to estimate that the average American of that period moved a total of 88,560 miles in his lifetime. (* This is based on a life expectancy of 54 years. Actual life expectancy for white males in the United States in 1920 was 54.1 years.) Today, by contrast, the average American car owner drives 10,000 miles per year – and he lives longer than his father or grandfather. "At sixty-nine years of age," wrote Fuller a few years ago, "... I am one of a class of several million human beings who, in their lifetimes, have each covered 3,000,000 miles or more" – more than thirty times the total lifetime travel of the 1914 American.

The aggregate figures are staggering. In 1967, for instance, 108,000,000 Americans took 360,000,000 trips involving an overnight stay more than 100 miles from home. These trips alone accounted for 312,000,000,000 passenger miles.

Even if we ignore the introduction of fleets of jumbo jets, trucks, cars, trains, subways and the like, our social investment in mobility is astonishing. Paved roads and streets have been added to the American landscape at the incredible rate of more than 200 miles per day, every single day for at least the last twenty years. This adds up to 75,000 miles of new streets and roads every year, enough to girdle the globe three times. While United States population increased during this period by 38.5 percent, street and road mileage shot up 100 percent. Viewed another way, the figures are even more dramatic: passenger miles traveled within the United States have been increasing at a rate six times faster than population for at least twenty-five years.

This revolutionary step-up in per capita movement through space is paralleled, to greater or lesser degree, throughout the most technological nations. Anyone who has watched the rush hour traffic pileup on the once peaceful Strandvëg in Stockholm cannot help but be jolted by the sight. In Rotterdam and Amsterdam, streets built as recently as five years ago are already horribly jammed: the number of automobiles has multiplied faster than anyone then thought possible.

In addition to the increase in everyday movement between one's home and various other nearby points, there is also a phenomenal increase in business and vacation travel involving overnight stays away from home. Nearly 1,500,000 Germans will vacation in Spain this summer, and hundreds of thousands more will populate beaches in Holland and Italy. Sweden annually welcomes more than 1,200,000 visitors from non-Scandinavian nations. More than a million foreigners visit the United States, while roughly 4,000,000 Americans travel overseas each year. A writer in Le Figaro justifiably refers to "gigantic human exchanges."

This busy movement of men back and forth over the landscape (and sometimes under it) is one of the identifying characteristics of super-industrial society. By contrast, preindustrial nations seem congealed, frozen, their populations profoundly attached to a single place. Transportation expert Wilfred Owen talks about the "gap between the immobile and the mobile nations." He points out that for Latin America, Africa and Asia to reach the same ratio of road mileage to area that now prevails in the European Economic Community, they would have to pave some 40,000,000 miles of road. This contrast has profound economic consequences, but it also has subtle, largely overlooked cultural and psychological consequences. For migrants, travelers and nomads are not the same kind of people as those who stay put in one place.

Perhaps the most psychologically significant kind of movement that an individual can make is geographical relocation of his home. This dramatic form of geographical mobility is also strikingly evident in the United States and the other advanced nations. Speaking of the United States, Peter Drucker has said: "The largest migration in our history began during World War II; and it has continued ever since with undiminished momentum." And political scientist Daniel Elazar describes the great masses of Americans who "have begun to move from place to place within each [urban] belt ... preserving a nomadic way of life that is urban without being permanently attached to any particular city ..."

Between March 1967 and March 1968 – in a single year – 36,600,000 Americans (not counting children less than one year old) changed their place of residence. This is more than the total population of Cambodia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Iraq, Israel, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Tunisia combined. It is as if the entire population of all these countries had suddenly been relocated. And movement on this massive scale occurs every year in the United States. In each year since 1948 one out of five Americans changed his address, picking up his children, some household effects, and starting life anew at a fresh place. Even the great migrations of history, the Mongol hordes, the westward movement of Europeans in the nineteenth century, seem puny by statistical comparison.

While this high rate of geographical mobility in the United States is probably unmatched anywhere in the world (available statistics, unfortunately, are spotty), even in the more tradition-bound of the advanced countries the age-old ties between man and place are being shattered. Thus the New Society, a social science journal published in London, reports that "The English are a more mobile race than perhaps they thought ... No less than 11 percent of all the people in England and Wales in 1961 had lived in their present usual residence less than a year ... In certain parts o€ England, in fact, it appears that the migratory movements are nothing less than frenetic. In Kensington over 25 percent had lived in their homes less than a year, in Hampstead 20 percent, in Chelsea 19 percent." And Anne Lapping, in another issue of the same journal, states that "new houseowners expect to move house many more times than their parents. The average life of a mortgage is eight to nine years ..." This is only slightly different than in the United States.

In France, a continuing housing shortage contrives to slow down internal mobility, but even there a study by demographer Guy Pourcher suggests that each year 8 to 10 percent of all Frenchmen shift homes. In Sweden, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the rate of domestic migration appears to be on the rise. And Europe is experiencing a wave of international mass migration unlike anything since the disruptions of World War II. Economic prosperity in Northern Europe has created widespread labor shortages (except in England) and has attracted masses of unemployed agricultural workers from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries.

They come by the thousands from Algeria, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia and Turkey. Every Friday afternoon 1000 Turkish workers in Istanbul clamber aboard a train heading north toward the promised lands. The cavernous rail terminal in Munich has become a debarkation point for many of them, and Munich now has its own Turkish-language newspaper. In Cologne, at the huge Ford factory, fully one-quarter of the workers are Turks. Other foreigners have fanned out through Switzerland, France, England, Denmark and as far north as Sweden. Not long ago, in the twelfth-century town of Pangbourne in England, my wife and I were served by Spanish waiters. And in Stockholm we visited the Vivel, a downtown restaurant that has become a meeting place for transplanted Spaniards who hunger for flamenco music with their dinner. There were no Swedes present; with the exception of a few Algerians and ourselves, everyone spoke Spanish. It was no surprise therefore to find that Swedish sociologists today are torn by debate over whether foreign worker populations should be assimilated into Swedish culture or encouraged to retain their own cultural traditions – precisely the same "melting pot" argument that excited American social scientists during the great period of open immigration in the United States.

There are, however, important differences between the kind of people who are on the move in the United States and those caught up in the European migrations. In Europe most of the new mobility can be attributed to the continuing transition from agriculture to industry; from the past to the present, as it were. Only a small part is as yet associated with the transition from industrialism to super-industrialism. In the United States, by contrast, the continuing redistribution of population is no longer primarily caused by the decline of agricultural employment. It grows, instead, out of the spread of automation and the new way of life associated with super-industrial society, the way of life of the future.

This becomes plain if we look at who is doing the moving in the United States. It is true that some technologically backward and disadvantaged groups, such as urban Negroes, are characterized by high rates of geographical mobility, usually within the same neighborhood or county. But these groups form only a relatively small slice of the total population, and it would be a serious mistake to assume that high rates of geographical mobility correlate only with poverty, unemployment or ignorance. In fact, we find that men with at least one year of college education (an ever increasing group) move more, and further, than those without. Thus we find that the professional and technical populations are among the most mobile of all Americans. And we find an increasing number of affluent executives who move far and frequently. (It is a house joke among executives of the International Business Machine Corporation that IBM stands for "I've Been Moved.") In the emerging super-industrialism it is precisely these groups – professional, technical and managerial – who increase in both absolute number and as a proportion of the total work force. They also give the society its characteristic flavor, as the denim-clad factory worker did in the past.

Just as millions of poverty-stricken and unemployed rural workers are flowing from the agricultural past into the industrial present in Europe, so thousands of European scientists, engineers and technicians are flowing into the United States and Canada, the most superindustrial of nations. In West Germany, Professor Rudolf Mossbauer, a Nobel prizewinner in physics, announces that he is thinking of migrating to America because of disagreements over administrative and budgetary policies at home. Europe's political ministers, worried over the "technology gap," have looked on helplessly as Westinghouse, Allied Chemical, Douglas Aircraft, General Dynamics and other major American corporations sent talent scouts to London or Stockholm to lure away everyone from astrophysicists to turbine engineers.

But there is a simultaneous "brain-drain" inside the United States, with thousands of scientists and engineers moving back and forth like particles in an atom. There are, in fact, well recognized patterns of movement. Two major streams, one from the North and the other from the South, both converge in California and the other Pacific Coast states, with a way station at Denver. Another major stream flows up from the South toward Chicago and Cambridge, Princeton and Long Island. A counter-stream carries men back to the space and electronics industries in Florida.

A typical young space engineer of my acquaintance quit his job with RCA at Princeton to go to work for General Electric. The house he had purchased only two years before was sold; his family moved into a rented house just outside Philadelphia, while a new one was built for them. They will move into this new house – the fourth in about five years – provided he is not transferred or offered a better job elsewhere. And all the time, California beckons.

There is a less obvious geographical pattern to the movement of management men, but, if anything, the turnover is heavier. A decade ago William Whyte, in The Organization Man, declared that "The man who leaves home is not the exception in American society but the key to it. Almost by definition, the organization man is a man who left home and ... kept on going." His characterization, correct then, is even truer today. The Wall Street Journal refers to "corporate gypsies" in an article headlined "How Executive Family Adapts to Incessant Moving About Country." It describes the life of M. E. Jacobson, an executive with the Montgomery Ward retail chain. He and his wife, both forty-six at the time the story appeared, had moved twenty-eight times in twenty-six years of married life. "I almost feel like we're just camping," his wife tells her visitors. While their case is atypical, thousands like them move on the average of once every two years, and their numbers multiply. This is true not merely because corporate needs are constantly shifting, but also because top management regards frequent relocation of its potential successors as a necessary step in their training.

This moving of executives from house to house as if they were life-size chessmen on a continent-sized board has led one psychologist to propose facetiously a money-saving system called "The Modular Family." Under this scheme, the executive not only leaves his house behind, but his family as well. The company then finds him a matching family (personality characteristics carefully selected to duplicate those of the wife and children left behind) at the new site. Some other itinerant executive then "plugs into" the family left behind. No one appears to have taken the idea seriously – yet.

In addition to the large groups of professionals, technicians and executives who engage in a constant round of "musical homes," there are many other peculiarly mobile groupings in the society. A large military establishment includes tens of thousands of families who, peacetime and wartime, move again and again. "I'm not decorating any more houses," snaps the wife of an army colonel with irony in her voice: "The curtains never fit from one house to the next and the rug is always the wrong size or color. From now on I'm decorating my car." Tens of thousands of skilled construction workers add to the flow. On another level are the more than 750,000 students attending colleges away from their home state, plus the hundreds of thousands more who are away from home but still within their home state. For millions, and particularly for the "people of the future," home is where you find it.

Such tidal movements of human beings produce all sorts of seldom-noticed side effects. Businesses that mail direct to the customer's home spend uncounted dollars keeping their address lists up to date. The same is true of telephone companies. Of the 885,000 listings in the Washington, D. C., telephone book in 1969, over half were different from the year before. Similarly, organizations and associations have a difficult time knowing where their members are. Within a single recent year fully one-third of the members of the National Society for Programmed Instruction, an organization of educational researchers, changed their addresses. Even friends have trouble keeping up with each other's whereabouts. One can sympathize with the plaint of poor Count Lanfranco Rasponi, who laments that travel and movement have destroyed "society." There is no social season any more, he says, because nobody is anywhere at the same time – except, of course, nobodies. The good Count has been quoted as saying: "Before this, if you wanted twenty for dinner, you'd have to ask forty – but now you first ask 200."

Despite such inconveniences, the overthrow of the tyranny of geography opens a form of freedom that proves exhilarating to millions. Speed, movement and even relocation carry positive connotations for many. This accounts for the psychological attachment that Americans and Europeans display toward automobiles – the technological incarnation of spatial freedom. Motivational researcher Ernest Dichter has unburdened himself of abundant Freudian nonsense in his time, but he is shrewdly insightful when he suggests that the auto is the "most powerful tool for mastery" available to the ordinary Western man. "The automobile has become the modern symbol of initiation. The license of the sixteen-year-old is a valid admission to adult society."

In the affluent nations, he writes, "most people have enough to eat and are reasonably well housed. Having achieved this thousand-year-old dream of humanity, they now reach out for further satisfactions. They want to travel, discover, be at least physically independent. The automobile is the mobile symbol of mobility ..." In fact, the last thing that any family wishes to surrender, when hardpressed by financial hardship, is the automobile, and the worst punishment an American parent can mete out to a teen-ager is to "ground" him – i.e., deprive him of the use of an automobile.

Young girls in the United States, when asked what they regard as important about a boy, immediately list a car. Sixty-seven percent of those interviewed in a recent survey said a car is "essential," and a nineteen-year-old boy, Alfred Uranga of Albuquerque, N. M., confirmed gloomily that "If a guy doesn't have a car, he doesn't have a girl." Just how deep this passion for automobility runs among the youth is tragically illustrated by the suicide of a seventeen-year-old Wisconsin boy, William Nebel, who was "grounded" by his father after his driver's license was suspended for speeding. Before putting a .22 caliber rifle bullet in his brain, the boy penned a note that ended, "Without a license, I don't have my car, job or social life. So I think that it is better to end it all right now." It is clear that millions of young people all over the technological world agree with the poet Marinetti who, more than half a century ago, shouted: "A roaring racing car ... is more beautiful than the Winged Victory."

Freedom from fixed social position is linked so closely with freedom from fixed geographical position, that when super-industrial man feels socially constricted his first impulse is to relocate. This idea seldom occurs to the peasant raised in his village or the coalminer toiling away in the black deeps. "A lot of problems are solved by migration. Go. Travel!" said a student of mine before rushing off to join the Peace Corps. But movement becomes a positive value in its own right, an assertion of freedom, not merely a response to or escape from outside pressures. A survey of 539 subscribers to Redbook magazine sought to determine why their addresses had changed in the previous year. Along with such reasons as "family grew too big for old home" or "pleasanter surroundings" fully ten percent checked off "just wanted a change."

An extreme manifestation of this urge to move is found among the female hitch-hikers who are beginning to form a recognizable sociological category of their own. Thus a young Catholic girl in England gives up her job selling advertising space for a magazine and goes off with a friend intending to hitchhike to Turkey. In Hamburg the girls split up. The first girl, Jackie, cruises the Greek Islands, reaches Istanbul, and at length returns to England, where she takes a job with another magazine. She stays only long enough to finance another trip. After that she comes back and works as a waitress, rejecting promotion to hostess on grounds that "I don't expect to be in England very long." At twenty-three Jackie is a confirmed hitch-hiker, thumbing her way indefatigably all over Europe with a gas pistol in her rucksack, returning to England for six or eight months, then starting out again. Ruth, twenty-eight, has been living this way for years, her longest stay in any one place having been three years. Hitchhiking as a way of life, she says, is fine because while it is possible to meet people, "you don't get too involved."

Teen-age girls in particular – perhaps eager to escape restrictive home environments – are passionately keen travelers. A survey of girls who read Seventeen, for example, showed that 40.2 percent took one or more "major" trips during the summer before the survey. Sixtynine percent of these trips carried the girl outside her home state, and nine percent took her abroad. But the itch to travel begins long before the teen years. Thus when Beth, the daughter of a New York psychiatrist, learned that a friend of her's had visited Europe, her tearful response was: "I'm nine years old already and I've never been to Europe!"

This positive attitude toward movement is reflected in survey findings that Americans tend to admire travelers. Thus researchers at the University of Michigan have found that respondents frequently term travelers "lucky" or "happy." To travel is to gain status, which explains why so many American travelers keep ragged airline tags on their luggage or attaché cases long after their return from a trip. One wag has suggested that someone set up a business washing and ironing old airline tags for status-conscious travelers.

Moving one's household, on the other hand, is a cause for commiseration rather than congratulations. Everyone makes ritual comments about the hardships of moving. Yet the fact is that those who have moved once are much more likely to move again than those who have never moved. The French sociologist Alain Touraine explains that "having already made one change and being less attached to the community, they are the readier to move again ..." And a British trade-union official, R. Clark, not long ago told an international manpower conference that mobility might well be a habit formed in student days. He pointed out that those who spent their college years away from home move in less restricted circles than uneducated and more home-bound manual workers. Not only do these college people move more in later life, but he suggested, they pass on to their children attitudes that facilitate mobility. While for many worker families relocation is a dreaded necessity, a consequence of unemployment or other hardships, for the middle and upper classes moving is most often associated with the extension of the good life. For them, traveling is a joy, and moving out usually means moving up.

In short, throughout the nations in transition to super-industrialism, among the people of the future, movement is a way of life, a liberation from the constrictions of the past, a step into the still more affluent future.

Dramatically different attitudes, however, are evinced by the "immobiles." It is not only the agricultural villager in India or Iran who remains fixed in one place for most or all of his life. The same is true of millions of blue-collar workers, particularly those in backward industries. As technological change roars through the advanced economies, outmoding whole industries and creating new ones almost overnight, millions of unskilled and semiskilled workers find themselves compelled to relocate. The economy demands mobility, and most Western governments – notably Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United States – spend large sums to encourage workers to retrain for new jobs and leave their homes in pursuit of them. For coalminers in Appalachia or textile workers in the French provinces, however, this proves to be excruciatingly painful. Even for big-city workers uprooted by urban renewal and relocated quite near to their former homes, the disruption is often agonizing.

"It is quite precise to speak of their reactions," says Dr. Marc Fried of the Center for Community Studies, Massachusetts General Hospital, "as expressions of grief. These are manifest in the feelings of painful loss, the continued longing, the general depressive tone, frequent symptoms of psychological or social or somatic distress ... the sense of helplessness, the occasional expressions of both direct and displaced anger, and tendencies to idealize the lost place." The responses, he declares, are "strikingly similar to mourning for a lost person."

Sociologist Monique Viot, of the French Ministry of Social Affairs, says: "The French are very attached to their geographical backgrounds. For jobs even thirty or forty kilometers away they are reluctant – extremely reluctant – to move. The unions call such moves 'deportations.'"

Even some educated and affluent movers show signs of distress when they are called upon to relocate. The author Clifton Fadiman, telling of his move from a restful Connecticut town to Los Angeles, reports that he was shortly "felled by a shotgun burst of odd physical and mental ailments ... In the course of six months my illness got straightened out. The neurologist ... diagnosed my trouble as 'culture shock' ..." For relocation of one's home, even under the most favorable circumstances, entails a series of difficult psychological readjustments.

In a famous study of a Canadian suburb they call Crestwood Heights, sociologists J. R. Seeley, R. A. Sim, and E. W. Loosley, state: "The rapidity with which the transition has to be accomplished, and the depth to which change must penetrate the personality are such as to call for the greatest flexibility of behavior and stability of personality. Ideology, speech sometimes, food habits, and preferences in decor must be made over with relative suddenness and in the absence of unmistakable clues as to the behavior to be adopted."

The steps by which people make such adjustments have been mapped out by psychiatrist James S. Tyhurst of the University of British Columbia. "In field studies of individuals following immigration," he says, "a fairly consistent pattern can ... be defined. Initially, the person is concerned with the immediate present, with an attempt to find work, make money, and find shelter. These features are often accompanied by restlessness and increased psychomotor activity ..."

As the person's sense of strangeness or incongruity in the new surroundings grows, a second phase, "psychological arrival," takes place. "Characteristic of this are increasing anxiety and depression; increasing self-preoccupation, often with somatic preoccupations and somatic symptoms; general withdrawal from the society in contrast to previous activity; and some degree of hostility and suspicion. The sense of difference and helplessness becomes increasingly intense and the period is characterized by marked discomfort and turmoil. This period of more or less disturbance may last for ... one to several months."

Only then does the third phase begin. This takes the form of relative adjustment to the new surroundings, a settling in, or else, in extreme cases, "the development of more severe disturbances manifested by more intense disorders of mood, the development of abnormal mental content and breaks with reality." Some people, in short, never do adjust adequately.

Even when they do, however, they are no longer the same as before, for any relocation, of necessity, destroys a complex web-work of old relationships and establishes a set of new ones. It is this disruption that, especially if repeated more than once, breeds the "loss of commitment" that many writers have noted among the high mobiles. The man on the move is ordinarily in too much of a hurry to put down roots in any one place. Thus an airline executive is quoted as saying he avoids involvement in the political life of his community because "in a few years I won't even be living here. You plant a tree and you never see it grow." This non-involvement or, at best, limited participation, has been sharply criticized by those who see in it a menace to the traditional ideal of grass-roots democracy. They overlook, however, an important reality: the possibility that those who refuse to involve themselves deeply in community affairs may be showing greater moral responsibility than those who do – and then move away. The movers boost a tax rate – but avoid paying the piper because they are no longer there. They help defeat a school bond issue – and leave the children of others to suffer the consequences. Does it not make more sense, is it not more responsible, to disqualify oneself in advance? Yet if one does withdraw from participation, refusing to join organizations, refusing to establish close ties with neighbors, refusing, in short, to commit oneself, what happens to the community and the self? Can individuals or society survive without commitment?

Commitment takes many forms. One of these is attachment to place. We can understand the significance of mobility only if we first recognize the centrality of fixed place in the psychological architecture of traditional man. This centrality is reflected in our culture in innumerable ways. Indeed, civilization, itself, began with agriculture – which meant settlement, an end, at last, to the dreary treks and migrations of the paleolithic nomad. The very word "rootedness" to which we pay so much attention today is agricultural in origin. The precivilized nomad listening to a discussion of "roots" would scarcely have understood the concept.

The notion of roots is taken to mean a fixed place, a permanently anchored "home." In a harsh, hungry and dangerous world, home, even when no more than a hovel, came to be regarded as the ultimate retreat, rooted in the earth, handed down from generation to generation, one's link with both nature and the past. The immobility of home was taken for granted, and literature overflows with reverent references to the importance of home. "Seek home for rest, For home is best" are lines from Instructions to Housewifery, a sixteenthcentury manual by Thomas Tusser, and there are dozens of what one might, at the risk of a terrible pun, call "home-ilies" embedded in the culture. "A man's home is his castle ..." "There's no place like home ..." "Home, sweet home ..." The syrupy glorification of home reached, perhaps, a climax in nineteenth-century England at precisely the time that industrialism was uprooting the rural folk and converting them into urban masses. Thomas Hood, the poet of the poor, tells us that "each heart is whispering, Home, Home at last ..." and Tennyson paints a classically cloying picture of

In a world churned by the industrial revolution, and in which all things were decidedly not "in order stored," home was the anchorage, the fixed point in the storm. If nothing else, at least it could be counted upon to stay in one place. Alas, this was poetry, not reality, and it could not hold back the forces that were to tear man loose from fixed location.

The nomad of the past moved through blizzards and parching heat, always pursued by hunger, but he carried with him his buffalo-hide tent, his family and the rest of his tribe. He carried his social setting with him, and, as often as not, the physical structure that he called home. In contrast, the new nomads of today leave the physical structure behind. (It becomes an entry in the tables showing the turnover rate for things in their lives.) And they leave all but their family, the most immediate social setting, behind. The downgrading of the importance of place, the decline in commitment to it, is expressed in scores of ways. A recent example was the decision of Ivy League colleges in the United States to de-emphasize geographical considerations in their admissions policies. These elite colleges traditionally applied geographical criteria to applicants, deliberately favoring boys from homes located far from their campuses, in the hopes of assembling a highly diversified student body. Between the 1930's and the 1950's, for example, Harvard cut in half the percentage of its students from homes in New England and New York. Today, says an official of the university, "We're pulling back on this geographical distribution thing."

Place, it is now recognized, is no longer a primary source of diversity. Differences between people no longer correlate closely with geographical background. The address on the application form may be purely temporary anyway. Many people no longer stay in one place long enough to acquire distinctive regional or local characteristics. Says the dean of admissions at Yale: "Of course, we still send our recruiting people to out-of-the-way places like Nevada, but there's really as much diversity in taking Harlem, Park Avenue and Queens." According to this official, Yale has virtually dropped geography altogether as a consideration in selection. And his counterpart at Princeton reports: "It is not the place they're from, really, but rather some sense of a different background that we're looking for."

Mobility has stirred the pot so thoroughly that the important differences between people are no longer strongly place-related. So far has the decline in commitment to place gone, according to Prof. John Dyckman of the University of Pennsylvania, that "Allegiance to a city or state is even now weaker for many than allegiance to a corporation, a profession, or a voluntary association." Thus it might be said that commitments are shifting from placerelated social structures (city, state, nation or neighborhood) to those (corporation, profession, friendship network) that are themselves mobile, fluid, and, for all practical purposes, placeless.

Commitment, however, appears to correlate with duration of relationship. Armed with a culturally conditioned set of durational expectancies, we have all learned to invest with emotional content those relationships that appear to us to be "permanent" or relatively longlasting, while withholding emotion, as much as possible, from short-term relationships. There are, of course, exceptions; the swift summer romance is one. But, in general, across a broad variety of relationships, the correlation holds. The declining commitment to place is thus related not to mobility per se, but to a concomitant of mobility – the shorter duration of place relationships.

In seventy major United States cities, for example, including New York, average residence in one place is less than four years. Contrast this with the lifelong residence in one place characteristic of the rural villager. Moreover, residential relocation is critical in determining the duration of many other place relationships, so that when an individual terminates his relationship with a home, he usually also terminates his relationship with all kinds of "satellite" places in the neighborhood. He changes his supermarket, gas station, bus stop and barbershop, thus cutting short a series of other place relationships along with the home relationship. Across the board, therefore, we not only experience more places in the course of a lifetime, but, on average, maintain our link with each place for a shorter and shorter interval.

Thus we begin to see more clearly how the accelerative thrust in society affects the individual. For this telescoping of man's relationships with place precisely parallels the truncation of his relationship with things.

In both cases, the individual is forced to make and break his ties more rapidly. In both cases, the level of transience rises. In both cases, he experiences a quickening of the pace of life.

Chapter 6 PEOPLE: THE MODULAR MAN

Each spring an immense lemming-like migration begins all over the Eastern United States. Singly and in groups, burdened with sleeping bags, blankets and bathing suits, some 15,000 American college students toss aside their texts and follow a highly accurate homing instinct that leads them to the sun-bleached shoreline of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There, for approximately a week, this teeming, milling mass of sun and sex worshippers swims, sleeps, flirts, guzzles beer, sprawls and brawls in the sands. At the end of this period the bikini-clad girls and their bronzed admirers pack their kits and join in a mass exodus. Anyone near the booth set up by the resort city to welcome this rambunctious army can now hear the loudspeaker booming: "Car with two can take rider as far as Atlanta ... Need ride to Washington ... Leaving at 10:00 for Louisville ..." In a few hours nothing is left of the great "beach-and-booze party" except butts and beer cans in the sand, and about $1.5 million in the cash registers of local merchants – who regard this annual invasion as a tainted blessing that threatens public sanity while it underwrites private profit.

What attracts the young people is more than an irrepressible passion for sunshine. Nor is it mere sex, a commodity available in other places as well. Rather, it is a sense of freedom without responsibility. In the words of a nineteen-year-old New York co-ed who made her way to the festivities recently: "You're not worried about what you do or say here because, frankly, you'll never see these people again."

What the Fort Lauderdale rite supplies is a transient agglomeration of people that makes possible a great diversity of temporary interpersonal relationships. And it is precisely this – temporariness – that increasingly characterizes human relations as we move further toward super-industrialism. For just as things and places flow through our lives at a faster clip, so, too, do people.

Urbanism – the city dweller's way of life – has preoccupied sociology since the turn of the century. Max Weber pointed out the obvious fact that people in cities cannot know all their neighbors as intimately as it was possible for them to do in small communities. Georg Simmel carried this idea one step further when he declared, rather quaintly, that if the urban individual reacted emotionally to each and every person with whom he came into contact, or cluttered his mind with information about them, he would be "completely atomized internally and would fall into an unthinkable mental condition."

Louis Wirth, in turn, noted the fragmented nature of urban relationships. "Characteristically, urbanites meet one another in highly segmental roles ..." he wrote. "Their dependence upon others is confined to a highly fractionalized aspect of the other's round of activity." Rather than becoming deeply involved with the total personality of every individual we meet, he explained, we necessarily maintain superficial and partial contact with some. We are interested only in the efficiency of the shoe salesman in meeting our needs: we couldn't care less that his wife is an alcoholic.

What this means is that we form limited involvement relationships with most of the people around us. Consciously or not, we define our relationships with most people in functional terms. So long as we do not become involved with the shoe salesman's problems at home, or his more general hopes, dreams and frustrations, he is, for us, fully interchangeable with any other salesman of equal competence. In effect, we have applied the modular principle to human relationships. We have created the disposable person: Modular Man.

Rather than entangling ourselves with the whole man, we plug into a module of his personality. Each personality can be imagined as a unique configuration of thousands of such modules. Thus no whole person is interchangeable with any other. But certain modules are. Since we are seeking only to buy a pair of shoes, and not the friendship, love or hate of the salesman, it is not necessary for us to tap into or engage with all the other modules that form his personality. Our relationship is safely limited. There is limited liability on both sides. The relationship entails certain accepted forms of behavior and communication. Both sides understand, consciously or otherwise, the limitations and laws. Difficulties arise only when one or another party oversteps the tacitly understood limits, when he attempts to connect up with some module not relevant to the function at hand.

Today a vast sociological and psychological literature is devoted to the alienation presumed to flow from this fragmentation of relationships. Much of the rhetoric of existentialism and the student revolt decries this fragmentation. It is said that we are not sufficiently "involved" with our fellow man. Millions of young people go about seeking "total involvement."

Before leaping to the popular conclusion that modularization is all bad, however, it might be well to look more closely at the matter. Theologian Harvey Cox, echoing Simmel, has pointed out that in an urban environment the attempt to "involve" oneself fully with everyone can lead only to self-destruction and emotional emptiness. Urban man, he writes, "must have more or less impersonal relationships with most of the people with whom he comes in contact precisely in order to choose certain friendships to nourish and cultivate ... His life represents a point touched by dozens of systems and hundreds of people. His capacity to know some of them better necessitates his minimizing the depth of his relationship to many others. Listening to the postman gossip becomes for the urban man an act of sheer graciousness, since he probably has no interest in the people the postman wants to talk about."

Moreover, before lamenting modularization, it is necessary to ask ourselves whether we really would prefer to return to the traditional condition of man in which each individual presumably related to the whole personality of a few people rather than to the personality modules of many. Traditional man has been so sentimentalized, so cloyingly romanticized, that we frequently overlook the consequences of such a return. The very same writers who lament fragmentation also demand freedom – yet overlook the unfreedom of people bound together in totalistic relationships. For any relationship implies mutual demands and expectations. The more intimately involved a relationship, the greater the pressure the parties exert on one another to fulfill these expectations. The tighter and more totalistic the relationship, the more modules, so to speak, are brought into play, and the more numerous are the demands we make.

In a modular relationship, the demands are strictly bounded. So long as the shoe salesman performs his rather limited service for us, thereby fulfilling our rather limited expectations, we do not insist that he believe in our God, or that he be tidy at home, or share our political values, or enjoy the same kind of food or music that we do. We leave him free in all other matters – as he leaves us free to be atheist or Jew, heterosexual or homosexual, John Bircher or Communist. This is not true of the total relationship and cannot be. To a certain point, fragmentation and freedom go together.

All of us seem to need some totalistic relationships in our lives. But to decry the fact that we cannot have only such relationships is nonsense. And to prefer a society in which the individual has holistic relationships with a few, rather than modular retionships with many, is to wish for a return to the imprisonment of the past – a past when individuals may have been more tightly bound to one another, but when they were also more tightly regimented by social conventions, sexual mores, political and religious restrictions.

This is not to say that modular relationships entail no risks or that this is the best of all possible worlds. There are, in fact, profound risks in the situation, as we shall attempt to show. Until now, however, the entire public and professional discussion of these issues has been badly out of focus. For it has overlooked a critical dimension of all interpersonal relationships: their duration.

Sociologists like Wirth have referred in passing to the transitory nature of human ties in urban society. But they have made no systematic effort to relate the shorter duration of human ties to shorter durations in other kinds of relationships. Nor have they attempted to document the progressive decline in these durations. Until we analyze the temporal character of human bonds, we will completely misunderstand the move toward super-industrialism.

For one thing, the decline in the average duration of human relationships is a likely corollary of the increase in the number of such relationships. The average urban individual today probably comes into contact with more people in a week than the feudal villager did in a year, perhaps even a lifetime. The villager's ties with other people no doubt included some transient relationships, but most of the people he knew were the same throughout his life. The urban man may have a core group of people with whom his interactions are sustained over long periods of time, but he also interacts with hundreds, perhaps thousands of people whom he may see only once or twice and who then vanish into anonymity.

All of us approach human relationships, as we approach other kinds of relationships, with a set of built-in durational expectancies. We expect that certain kinds of relationships will endure longer than others. It is, in fact, possible to classify relationships with other people in terms of their expected duration. These vary, of course, from culture to culture and from person to person. Nevertheless, throughout wide sectors of the population of the advanced technological societies something like the following order is typical:

Long-duration relationships. We expect ties with our immediate family, and to a lesser extent with other kin, to extend throughout the lifetimes of the people involved. This expectation is by no means always fulfilled, as rising divorce rates and family break-ups indicate. Nevertheless, we still theoretically marry "until death do us part" and the social ideal is a lifetime relationship. Whether this is a proper or realistic expectation in a society of high transience is debatable. The fact remains, however, that family links are expected to be long term, if not lifelong, and considerable guilt attaches to the person who breaks off such a relationship.

Medium-duration relationships. Four classes of relationships fall within this category. Roughly in order of descending durational expectancies, these are relationships with friends, neighbors, job associates, and co-members of churches, clubs and other voluntary organizations.

Friendships are traditionally supposed to survive almost, if not quite, as long as family ties. The culture places high value on "old friends" and a certain amount of blame attaches to dropping a friendship. One type of friendship relationship, however, acquaintanceship, is recognized as less durable.

Neighbor relationships are no longer regarded as long-term commitments – the rate of geographical turnover is too high. They are expected to last as long as the individual remains in a single location, an interval that is growing shorter and shorter on average. Breaking off with a neighbor may involve other difficulties, but it carries no great burden of guilt.

On-the-job relationships frequently overlap friendships, and less often, neighbor relationships. Traditionally, particularly among white-collar, professional and technical people, job relationships were supposed to last a relatively long time. This expectation, however, is also changing rapidly, as we shall see.

Co-membership relationships – links with people in church or civic organizations, political parties and the like – sometimes flower into friendship, but until that happens such individual associations are regarded as more perishable than either friendships, ties with neighbors or fellow workers.

Short-duration relationships. Most, though not all, service relationships fall into this category. These involve sales clerks, delivery people, gas station attendants, milkmen, barbers, hairdressers, etc. The turnover among these is relatively rapid and little or no shame attaches to the person who terminates such a relationship. Exceptions to the service patterns are professionals such as physicians, lawyers and accountants, with whom relationships are expected to be somewhat more enduring.

This categorization is hardly airtight. Most of us can cite some "service" relationship that has lasted longer than some friendship, job or neighbor relationship. Moreover, most of us can cite a number of quite long-lasting relationships in our own lives – perhaps we have been going to the same doctor for years or have maintained extremely close ties with a college friend. Such cases are hardly unusual, but they are relatively few in number in our lives. They are like long-stemmed flowers towering above a field of grass in which each blade represents a short-term relationship, a transient contact. It is the very durability of these ties that makes them noticeable. Such exceptions do not invalidate the rule. They do not change the key fact that, across the board, the average interpersonal relationship in our life is shorter and shorter in duration.

Continuing urbanization is merely one of a number of pressures driving us toward greater "temporariness" in our human relationships. Urbanization, as suggested earlier, brings great masses of people into close proximity, thereby increasing the actual number of contacts made. This process is, however, strongly reinforced by the rising geographical mobility described in the last chapter. Geographical mobility not only speeds up the flow of places through our lives, but the flow of people as well.

The increase in travel brings with it a sharp increase in the number of transient, casual relationships with fellow passengers, with hotel clerks, taxi drivers, airline reservation people, with porters, maids, waiters, with colleagues and friends of friends, with customs officials, travel agents and countless others. The greater the mobility of the individual, the greater the number of brief, face-to-face encounters, human contacts, each one a relationship of sorts, fragmentary and, above all, compressed in time. (Such contacts appear natural and unimportant to us. We seldom stop to consider how few of the sixty-six billion human beings who preceded us on the planet ever experienced this high rate of transience in their human relationships.)

If travel increases the number of contacts – largely with service people of one sort or another – residential relocation also steps up the through-put of people in our lives. Moving leads to the termination of relationships in almost all categories. The young submarine engineer who is transferred from his job in the Navy Yard at Mare Island, California, to the installation at Newport News, Virginia, takes only his most immediate family with him. He leaves behind parents and in-laws, neighbors, service and tradespeople, as well as his associates on the job, and others. He cuts short his ties. In settling down in the new community, he, his wife and child must initiate a whole cluster of new (and once more temporary) relationships.

Here is how one young wife, a veteran of eleven moves in the past seventeen years, describes the process: "When you live in a neighborhood you watch a series of changes take place. One day a new mailman delivers the mail. A few weeks later the girl at the check-out counter at the supermarket disappears and a new one takes her place. Next thing you know, the mechanic at the gas station is replaced. Meanwhile, a neighbor moves out next door and a new family moves in. These changes are taking place all the time, but they are gradual. When you move, you break all these ties at once, and you have to start all over again. You have to find a new pediatrician, a new dentist, a new car mechanic who won't cheat you, and you quit all your organizations and start over again." It is the simultaneous rupture of a whole range of existing relationships that makes relocation psychologically taxing for many.

The more frequently this cycle repeats itself, of course, in the life of the individual, the shorter the duration of the relationships involved. Among significant sectors of the population this process is now occurring so rapidly that it is drastically altering traditional notions of time with respect to human relationships. "At a cocktail party on Frogtown Road the other night," reads a story in The New York Times, "the talk got around to how long those at the party had lived in New Canaan. To nobody's surprise, it developed that the couple of longest residence had been there five years." In slower moving times and places, five years constituted little more than a breaking-in period for a family moved to a new community. It took that long to be "accepted." Today the breaking-in-period must be highly compressed in time.

Thus we have in many American suburbs a commercial "Welcome Wagon" service that accelerates the process by introducing newcomers to the chief stores and agencies in the community. A paid Welcome Wagon employee – usually a middle-aged lady – visits the newcomers, answers questions about the community, and leaves behind brochures and, sometimes, inexpensive gift certificates redeemable at local stores. Since it affects only relationships in the service category and is, actually, little more than a form of advertising, the Welcome Wagon's integrative impact is superficial.

The process of linking up with new neighbors and friends is, however, often quite effectively accelerated by the presence of certain people – usually divorced or single older women – who play the role of informal "integrator" in the community. Such people are found in many established suburbs and housing developments. Their function has been described by urban sociologist Robert Gutman of Rutgers University, who notes that while the integrator herself is frequently isolated from the mainstream of social life in the community, she derives pleasure from serving as a "bridge" for newcomers. She takes the initiative by inviting them to parties and other gatherings. The newcomers are duly flattered that an "oldtime" resident – in many communities "oldtime" means two years – is willing to invite them. The newcomers, alas, quickly learn that the integrator is herself an "outsider" whereupon, more often than not, they promptly disassociate themselves from her.

"Fortunately for the integrator," Gutman says, "by the time he or she managed to introduce the newcomer to the community and the newcomer in turn had gone on to abandon the integrator, there were new arrivals in the settlement to whom the integrator could once again proffer the hand of friendship."

Other people in the community also help speed the process of relationship formation. Thus, in developments, Gutman says, "Respondents reported that the real estate agents introduced them to neighbors before they had taken possession. In some cases, wives were called on by other wives in the neighborhood, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups. Neighboring wives, or husbands, encountered each other casually, while out gardening and cleaning up the yard or in tending children. And, of course, there were the usual meetings brought about by the children, who themselves often were the first to establish contact with the human population of the new environment."

Local organizations also play an important part in helping the individual integrate quickly into the community. This is more likely to be true among suburban homeowners than among housing development residents. Churches, political parties and women's organizations provide many of the human relationships that the newcomers seek. According to Gutman, "Sometimes a neighbor would inform the newcomer about the existence of the voluntary association, and might even take the newcomer to his first meeting; but even in these cases it was up to the migrant himself to find his own primary group within the association."

The knowledge that no move is final, that somewhere along the road the nomads will once more gather up their belongings and migrate, works against the development of relationships that are more than modular, and it means that if relationships are to be struck up at all, they had better be whipped into life quickly.

If, however, the breaking-in period is compressed in time, the leave-taking – the breaking-out – is also telescoped. This is particularly true of service relationships which, being unidimensional, can be both initiated and terminated with dispatch. "They come and they go," says the manager of a suburban food store. "You miss them one day and then you learn they've moved to Dallas." "Washington, D. C., retailers seldom have a chance to build long, enduring relationships with customers," observes a writer in Business Week. "Different faces all the time," says a conductor on the New Haven commuter line.

Even babies soon become aware of the transience of human ties. The "nanny" of the past has given way to the baby-sitter service which sends out a different person each time to mind the children. And the same trend toward time-truncated relationships is reflected in the demise of the family doctor. The late lamented family doctor, the general practitioner, did not have the refined narrow expertise of the specialist, but he did, at least, have the advantage of being able to observe the same patient almost from cradle to coffin. Today the patient doesn't stay put. Instead of enjoying a long-term relationship with a single physician, he flits back and forth between a variety of specialists, changing these relationships each time he relocates to a new community. Even within any single relationship, the contacts become shorter and shorter as well. Thus the authors of Crestwood Heights, discussing the interaction of experts and laymen, refer to "the short duration of any one exposure to each other ... The nature of their contact, which is in turn a function of busy, time-pressed lives on both sides, means that any message must be collapsed into a very brief communiqué, and that there must not be too many of these ..." The impact that this fragmentation and contraction of patient-doctor relationships has on health care ought to be more seriously explored.

Each time the family moves, it also tends to slough off a certain number of just plain friends and acquaintances. Left behind, they are eventually all but forgotten. Separation does not end all relationships. We maintain contact with, perhaps, one or two friends from the old location, and we tend to keep in sporadic touch with relatives. But with each move there is a deadly attrition. At first there is an eager flurry of letters back and forth. There may be occasional visits or telephone calls. But gradually these decrease in frequency. Finally, they stop coming. Says a typical English suburbanite after leaving London: "You can't forget it [London]. Not with all your family living there and that. We still got friends living in Plumstead and Eltham. We used to go back every weekend. But you can't keep that up."

John Barth has captured the sense of turnover among friendships in a passage from his novel The Floating Opera: "Our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we must either renew our friendship – catch up to date – or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more." The only fault in this is its unspoken suggestion that the current upon which friendships bob and float is lazy and meandering. The current today is picking up speed. Friendship increasingly resembles a canoe shooting the rapids of the river of change. "Pretty soon," says Professor Eli Ginzberg of Columbia University, an expert on manpower mobility, "we're all going to be metropolitan-type people in this country without ties or commitments to long time friends and neighbors." In a brilliant paper on "Friendships in the Future," psychologist Courtney Tall suggests that "Stability based on close relationships with a few people will be ineffective, due to the high mobility, wide interest range, and varying capacity for adaptation and change found among the members of a highly automated society ... Individuals will develop the ability to form close 'buddy-type' relationships on the basis of common interests or sub-group affiliations, and to easily leave these friendships, moving either to another location and joining a similar interest group or to another interest group within the same location ... Interests will change rapidly ...

"This ability to form and then to drop, or lower to the level of acquaintanceship, close relationships quickly, coupled with increased mobility, will result in any given individual forming many more friendships than is possible for most in the present ... Friendship patterns of the majority in the future will provide for many satisfactions, while substituting many close relationships of shorter durability for the few long-term friendships formed in the past."

One reason to believe that the trend toward temporary relationships will continue is the impact of new technology on occupations. Even if the push toward megalopolis stopped and people froze in their geographical tracks, there would still be a sharp increase in the number, and decrease in the duration of relationships as a consequence of job changes. For the introduction of advanced technology, whether we call it automation or not, is necessarily accompanied by drastic changes in the types of skills and personalities required by the economy.

Specialization increases the number of different occupations. At the same time, technological innovation reduces the life expectancy of any given occupation. "The emergence and decline of occupations will be so rapid," says economist Norman Anon, an expert in manpower problems, "that people will always be uncertain in them." The profession of airline flight engineer, he notes, emerged and then began to die out within a brief period of fifteen years.

A look at the "help wanted" pages of any major newspaper brings home the fact that new occupations are increasing at a mind-dazzling rate. Systems analyst, console operator, coder, tape librarian, tape handler, are only a few of those connected with computer operations. Information retrieval, optical scanning, thin-film technology all require new kinds of expertise, while old occupations lose importance or vanish altogether. When Fortune magazine in the mid-1960's surveyed 1,003 young executives employed by major American corporations, it found that fully one out of three held a job that simply had not existed until he stepped into it. Another large group held positions that had been filled by only one incumbent before them. Even when the name of the occupation stays the same, the content of the work is frequently transformed, and the people filling the jobs change.

Job turnover, however, is not merely a direct consequence of technological change. It also reflects the mergers and acquisitions that occur as industries everywhere frantically organize and reorganize themselves to adapt to the fast-changing environment, to keep up with myriad shifts in consumer preferences. Many other complex pressures also combine to stir the occupational mix incessantly. Thus a recent survey by the US Department of Labor revealed that the 71,000,000 persons in the American labor force had held their current jobs an average of 4.2 years. This compared with 4.6 years only three years earlier, a decline in duration of nearly 9 percent.

"Under conditions prevailing at the beginning of the 1960's," states another Labor Department report, "the average twenty-year-old man in the work force could be expected to change jobs about six or seven times." Thus instead of thinking in terms of a "career" the citizen of super-industrial society will think in terms of "serial careers."

Today, for manpower accounting purposes, men are classified according to their present jobs. A worker is a "machine operator" or a "sales clerk" or a "computer programmer." This system, born in a less dynamic period, is no longer adequate, according to many manpower experts. Efforts are now being made to characterize each worker not merely in terms of the present job held, but in terms of the particular "trajectory" that his career has followed. Each man's trajectory or career line will differ, but certain types of trajectories will recur. When asked "What do you do?" the super-industrial man will label himself not in terms of his present (transient) job, but in terms of his trajectory type, the overall pattern of his work life. Such labels are more appropriate to the super-industrial job market than the static descriptions used at present, which take no account of what the individual has done in the past, or of what he may be qualified to do in the future.

The high rate of job turnover now evident in the United States is also increasingly characteristic of Western European countries. In England, turnover in manufacturing industries runs an estimated 30 to 40 percent per year. In France about 20 percent of the total labor force is involved in job changes each year, and this figure, according to Monique Viot, is on the rise. In Sweden, according to Olof Gustafsson, director of the Swedish Manufacturing Association, "we count on an average turnover of 25 to 30 percent per year in the labor force ... Probably the labor turnover in many places now reaches 35 to 40 percent."

Whether or not the statistically measurable rate of job turnover is rising, however, makes little difference, for the measurable changes are only part of the story. The statistics take no account of changes of job within the same company or plant, or shifts from one department to another. A. K. Rice of the Tavistock Institute in London asserts that "Transfers from one department to another would appear to have the effect of the beginning of a 'new life' within the factory." The overall statistics on job turnover, by failing to take such changes into account, seriously underestimate the amount of shifting around that is actually taking place – each shift bringing with it the termination of old, and the initiation of new, human relationships.

Any change in job entails a certain amount of stress. The individual must strip himself of old habits, old ways of coping, and learn new ways of doing things. Even when the work task itself is similar, the environment in which it takes place is different. And just as is the case with moving to a new community, the newcomer is under pressure to form new relationships at high speed. Here, too, the process is accelerated by people who play the role of informal integrator. Here, too, the individual seeks out human relationships by joining organizations – usually informal and clique-like, rather than part of the company's table of organization. Here, too, the knowledge that no job is truly "permanent" means that the relationships formed are conditional, modular and, by most definitions, temporary.

In our discussion of geographical mobility we found that some individuals and groups are more mobile than others. With respect to occupational mobility, too, we find that some individuals or groups make more job changes than others. In a very crude sense, it is fair to say that people who are geographically mobile are quite likely to be occupationally mobile as well. Thus we once more find high turnover rates among some of the least affluent, least skilled groups in society. Exposed to the worst shocks and buffetings of an economy that demands educated, increasingly skilled workers, the poor bounce from job to job like a pinball between bumpers. They are the last hired and the first fired.

Throughout the middle range of education and affluence, we find people who, while certainly more mobile than agricultural populations, are nonetheless, relatively stable. And then, just as before, we find inordinately high and rising rates of turnover among those groups most characteristic of the future – the scientists and engineers, the highly educated professionals and technicians, the executives and managers.

Thus a recent study reveals that job turnover rates for scientists and engineers in the research and development industry in the United States are approximately twice as high as for the rest of American industry. The reason is easy to detect. This is precisely the speartip of technological change – the point at which the obsolescence of knowledge is most rapid. At Westinghouse, for example, it is believed that the so-called "half-life" of a graduate engineer is only ten years – meaning that fully one half of what he has learned will be outdated within a decade.

High turnover also characterizes the mass communications industries, especially advertising. A recent survey of 450 American advertising men found that 70 percent had changed their jobs within the last two years. Reflecting the rapid changes in consumer preferences, in art and copy styles, and in product lines, the same musical chairs game is played in England. There the circulation of personnel from one agency to another has occasioned cries of alarm within the industry, and many agencies refuse to list an employee as a regular until he has served for a full year.

But perhaps the most dramatic change has overtaken the ranks of management, once well insulated from the jolts of fate that afflicted the less fortunate. "For the first time in our history," says Dr. Harold Leavitt, professor of industrial administration and psychology, "obsolescence seems to be an imminent problem for management because for the first time, the relative advantage of experience over knowledge seems to be rapidly decreasing." Because it takes longer to train for modern management and the training itself becomes obsolete in a decade or so, as it does with engineers, Leavitt suggests that in the future "we may have to start planning careers that move downward instead of upward through time ... Perhaps a man should reach his peak of responsibility very early in his career and then expect to be moved downward or outward into simpler, more relaxing, kinds of jobs."

Whether upward, downward or sideways, the future holds more, not less, turnover in jobs. This realization is already reflected in the altered attitudes of those doing the hiring. "I used to be concerned whenever I saw a résumé with several jobs in it," admits an official of the Celanese Corporation. "I would be afraid that the guy was a job-hopper or an opportunist. But I'm not concerned anymore. What I want to know is why he made each move. Even five or six jobs over twenty years could be a plus ... In fact, if I had two equally qualified men, I'd take the man who moved a couple of times for valid reasons over the man who stayed in the same place. Why? I'd know he's adaptable." The director of executive personnel for International Telephone and Telegraph, Dr. Frank McCabe, says: "The more successful you are in attracting the comers, the higher your potential turnover rate is. The comers are movers."

The rising rate of turnover in the executive job market follows peculiar patterns of its own. Thus Fortune magazine reports: "The defection of a key executive starts not only a sequence of job changes in its own right but usually a series of collateral movements. When the boss moves, he is often flooded by requests from his immediate subordinates who want to go along; if he doesn't take them, they immediately begin to put out other feelers." No wonder a Stanford Research Institute report on the work environment of the year 1975 predicts that: "At upper white-collar levels, a great amount of turbulence and churning about is foreseen ... the managerial work environment will be both unsettled and unsettling."

Behind all this job jockeying lies not merely the engine of technological innovation, but also the new affluence, which opens new opportunities and at the same time raises expectations for psychological self-fulfillment. "The man who came up thirty years ago," says the vice president of industrial relations for Philco, a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, "believed in hanging on to any job until he knew where he was going. But men today seem to feel there's another job right down the pike." And, for most, there is.

Not infrequently the new job involves not merely a new employer, a new location, and a new set of work associates, but a whole new way of life. Thus the "serial career" pattern is evidenced by the growing number of people who, once assured of reasonable comfort by the affluent economy, decide to make a full 180-degree turn in their career line at a time of life when others merely look forward to retirement. We learn of a real estate lawyer who leaves his firm to study social science. An advertising agency copy supervisor, after twenty-five years on Madison Avenue, concludes that "The phony glamour became stale and boring. I simply had to get away from it." She becomes a librarian. A sales executive in Long Island and an engineer in Illinois leave their jobs to become manual-training teachers. A top interior decorator goes back to school and takes a job with the poverty program.

Each job change implies a step-up of the rate at which people pass through our lives, and as the rate of turnover increases, the duration of relationships declines. This is strikingly manifest in the rise to prominence of temporary help services – the human equivalent of the rental revolution. In the United States today nearly one out of every 100 workers is at some time during the year employed by a so-called "temporary help service" which, in turn, rents him or her out to industry to fill temporary needs.

Today some 500 temporary help agencies provide industry with an estimated 750,000 short-term workers ranging from secretaries and receptionists, to defense engineers. When the Lycoming Division of Avco Corporation needed 150 design engineers for hurry-up government contracts, it obtained them from a number of rental services. Instead of taking months to recruit them, it was able to assemble a complete staff in short order. Temporary employees have been used in political campaigns to man telephones and mimeograph machines. They have been called in for emergency duty in printing plants, hospitals and factories. They have been used in public relations activities. (In Orlando, Florida, temporaries were hired to give away dollar bills at a shopping center in an attempt to win publicity for the center.) More prosaically, tens of thousands of them fill routine office-work assignments to help the regular staff of large companies through peak-load periods. And one rental company, the Arthur Treacher Service System, advertises that it will rent maids, chauffeurs, butlers, cooks, handymen, babysitters, practical nurses, plumbers, electricians and other home service people. "Like Hertz and Avis rent cars" it adds.

The rental of temporary employees for temporary needs is, like the rental of physical objects, spreading all over the industrialized world. Manpower, Incorporated, the largest of the temporary help services, opened its operation in France in 1956. Since then it has doubled in size each year, and there are now some 250 such agencies in France.

Those employed by temporary help services express a variety of reasons for preferring this type of work. Says Hoke Hargett, an electromechanical engineer, "Every job I'm on is a crash job, and when the pressure is immense, I work better." In eight years, he has served in eleven different companies, meeting and then leaving behind hundreds of coworkers. For some skilled personnel organized jobhopping actually provides more job security than is available to supposedly permanent employees in highly volatile industries. In the defense industries sudden cut-backs and layoffs are so common, that the "permanent" employee is likely to find himself thrown on the street without much warning. The temporary help engineer simply moves off to another assignment when his project is completed.

More important for most temporary help workers is the fact that they can call their own turns. They can work very much when and where they wish. And for some it is a conscious way to broaden their circle of social contacts. One young mother, forced to move to a new city when her husband was transferred, found herself lonely during the long hours when her two children were away at school. Signing up with a temporary help service, she has worked eight or nine months a year since then and, by shifting from one company to another, has made contact with a large number of people from among whom she could select a few as friends.

Rising rates of occupational turnover and the spread of rentalism into employment relationships will further increase the tempo at which human relationships are formed and forgotten. This speedup, however, affects different groups in society in different ways. Thus, in general, working-class individuals tend to live closer to, and depend more on their relatives than do middle– and upper-class groups. In the words of psychiatrist Leonard Duhl, "Their ties of kinship mean more to them, and with less money available distance is more of a handicap." Working-class people are generally less adept at the business of coping with temporary relationships. They take longer to establish ties and are more reluctant to let them go. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in a greater reluctance to move or change jobs. They go when they have to, but seldom from choice.

In contrast, psychiatrist Duhl points out, "The professional, academic and uppermanagerial class [in the United States] is bound by interest ties across wide physical spaces and indeed can be said to have more functional relationships. Mobile individuals, easily duplicable relationships, and ties to interest problems depict this group."

What is involved in increasing the through-put of people in one's life are the abilities not only to make ties but to break them, not only to affiliate but to disaffiliate. Those who seem most capable of this adaptive skill are also among the most richly rewarded in society. Seymour Lipset and Reinhard Bendix in Social Mobility in Industrial Society declare that "the socially mobile among business leaders show an unusual capacity to break away from those who are liabilities and form relationships with those who can help them."

They support the findings of sociologist Lloyd Warner who suggests that "The most important component of the personalities of successful corporate managers and owners is that, their deep emotional identifications with their families of birth being dissolved, they no longer are closely intermeshed with the past, and, therefore, are capable of relating themselves easily to the present and future. They are people who have literally and spiritually left home ... They can relate and disrelate themselves to others easily."

And again, in Big Business Leaders in America, a study he conducted with James Abegglen, Warner writes: "Before all, these are men on the move. They left their homes, and all that this implies. They have left behind a standard of living, level of income, and style of life to adopt a way of living entirely different from that into which they were born. The mobile man first of all leaves the physical setting of his birth. This includes the house he lived in, the neighborhood he knew, and in many cases even the city, state and region in which he was born.

"This physical departure is only a small part of the total process of leaving that the mobile man must undergo. He must leave behind people as well as places. The friends of earlier years must be left, for acquaintances of the lower-status past are incompatible with the successful present. Often the church of his birth is left, along with the clubs and cliques of his family and of his youth. But most important of all, and this is the great problem of the man on the move, he must, to some degree, leave his father, mother, brothers, and sisters, along with the other human relationships of his past."

This so, it is not so startling to read in a business magazine a cooly detached guide for the newly promoted executive and his wife. It advises that he break with old friends and subordinates gradually, in order to minimize resentment. He is told to "find logical excuses for not joining the group at coffee breaks or lunch." Similarly, "Miss the department bowling or card sessions, occasionally at first, then more frequently." Invitations to the home of a subordinate may be accepted, but not reciprocated, except in the form of an invitation to a whole group of subordinates at once. After a while all such interaction should cease.

Wives are a special problem, we are informed, because they "don't understand the protocol of office organization." The successful man is advised to be patient with his wife, who may adhere to old relationships longer than he does. But, as one executive puts it, "a wife can be downright dangerous if she insists on keeping close friendships with the wives of her husband's subordinates. Her friendships will rub off on him, color his judgment about the people under him, jeopardize his job." Moreover, one personnel man points out, "When parents drift away from former friends, kids go too."

These matter-of-fact instructions on how to dis-relate send a chill down the spine of those raised on the traditional notion that friendships are for the long haul. But before accusing the business world of undue ruthlessness, it is important to recognize that precisely this pattern is employed, often beneath a veil of hypocritical regrets, in other strata of society as well. The professor who is promoted to dean, the military officer, the engineer who becomes a project leader, frequently play the same social game. Moreover, it is predictable that something like this pattern will soon extend far beyond the world of work and formal organization. For if friendship is based on shared interests or aptitudes, friendship relationships are bound to change when interests change – even when distinctions of social class are not involved. And in a society caught in the throes of the most rapid change in history, it would be astonishing if the interests of individuals did not also change kaleidoscopically.

Indeed, much of the social activity of individuals today can be described as search behavior – a relentless process of social discovery in which one seeks out new friends to replace those who are either no longer present or who no longer share the same interests. This turnover impels people, and especially educated people, toward cities and into temporary employment patterns. For the identification of people who share the same interests and aptitudes on the basis of which friendship may blossom is no simple procedure in a society in which specialization grows apace. The increase in specialization is present not merely in professional and work spheres, but even in leisure time pursuits. Seldom has any society offered so wide a range of acceptable and readily available leisure time activities. The greater the diversity available in both work and leisure, the greater the specialization, and the more difficult it is to find just the right friends.

Thus it has been estimated by Professor Sargant Florence in Britain that a minimum population of 1,000,000 is needed to provide a professional worker today with twenty interesting friends. The woman who sought temporary work as a strategy for finding friends was highly intelligent. By increasing the number of different people with whom she was thrown into work contact, she increased the mathematical probability of finding a few who share her interests and aptitudes.

We select our friends out of a very large pool of acquaintanceships. A study by Michael Gurevitch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked a varied group to keep track of all the different people with whom they came in contact in a one hundred-day period. On average, each one listed some 500 names. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who has conducted a number of fascinating experiments dealing with communication through acquaintanceship networks, speaks of each American having a pool of acquaintanceships ranging from 500 to 2,500.

Actually, however, most people have far fewer friends than the twenty suggested by Professor Florence, and perhaps his definition was less restrictive than that employed in everyday use. A study of thirty-nine married middle-class couples in Lincoln, Nebraska, asked them to list their friends. The purpose was to determine whether husbands or wives are more influential in selecting friends for the family. The study showed that the average couple listed approximately seven "friendship units" – such a unit being either an individual or a married couple. This suggests that the number of individuals listed as friends by the average couple ranged from seven to fourteen. Of these, a considerable number were non-local, and the fact that wives seemed to list more non-local friends than their husbands suggests that they are less willing than their husbands to slough off a friendship after a move. Men, in short, seem to be more skilled at breaking off relationships than women.

Today, however, training for disaffiliation or disrelating begins early. Indeed, this may well represent one of the major differences between the generations. For school children today are exposed to extremely high rates of turnover in their classrooms. According to the Educational Facilities Laboratories, Incorporated, an off-shoot of the Ford Foundation, "It is not unusual for city schools to have a turnover of more than half their student body in one school year." This phenomenal rate cannot but have some effect on the children.

William Whyte in The Organization Man pointed out that the impact of such mobility "is as severe on the teachers as on the children themselves, for the teachers are thereby robbed of a good bit of the feeling of achievement they get from watching the children develop." Today, however, the problem is compounded by the high rate of turnover among teachers too. This is true not only in the United States but elsewhere as well. Thus a report on England asserts: "Today it is not uncommon, even in grammar schools, for a child to be taught one subject by two or three different teachers in the course of one year. With teacher loyalty to the school so low, the loyalty of children cannot be summoned either. If a high proportion of teachers are preparing to move on to a better job, a better district, there will be less care, concern and commitment on their part." We can only speculate about the overall influence of this on the lives of the children.

A recent study of high school students by Harry R. Moore of the University of Denver indicated that the test scores of children who had moved across state or county lines from one to ten times were not substantially different from those of children who had not. But there was a definite tendency for the more nomadic children to avoid participation in the voluntary side of school life – clubs, sports, student government and other extra-curricular activities. It is as though they wished, where possible, to avoid new human ties that might only have to be broken again before long – as if they wished, in short, to slow down the flow-through of people in their lives.

How fast should children – or adults for that matter – be expected to make and break human relationships? Perhaps there is some optimum rate that we exceed at our peril? Nobody knows. However, if to this picture of declining durations we add the factor of diversity – the recognition that each new human relationship requires a different pattern of behavior from us – one thing becomes starkly clear: to be able to make these increasingly numerous and rapid on-off clicks in our interpersonal lives we must be able to operate at a level of adaptability never before asked of human beings.

Combine this with the accelerated through-put of places and things, as well as people, and we begin to glimpse the complexity of the coping behavior that we demand of people today. Certainly, the logical end of the direction in which we are now traveling is a society based on a system of temporary encounters, and a distinctly new morality founded on the belief, so succinctly expressed by the co-ed in Fort Lauderdale, that "frankly, you'll never see these people again." It would be absurd to assume that the future holds nothing more than a straight-line projection of present trends, that we must necessarily reach that ultimate degree of transience in human relations. But it is not absurd to recognize the direction in which we are moving.

Until now most of us have operated on the assumption that temporary relationships are superficial relationships, that only long-enduring ties can flower into real interpersonal involvement. Perhaps this assumption is false. Perhaps it is possible for holistic, non-modular relationships, to flower rapidly in a high transience society. It may prove possible to accelerate the formation of relationships, and to speed up the process of "involvement" as well. In the meantime, however, a haunting question remains:

"Is Fort Lauderdale the future?"

We have so far seen that with respect to all three of the tangible components of situations – people, places and things – the rate of turnover is rising. It is time now to look at those intangibles that are equally important in shaping experience, the information we use and the organizational frameworks within which we live.

Chapter 7 ORGANIZATIONS: THE COMING AD-HOCRACY

One of the most persistent myths about the future envisions man as a helpless cog in some vast organizational machine. In this nightmarish projection, each man is frozen into a narrow, unchanging niche in a rabbit-warren bureaucracy. The walls of this niche squeeze the individuality out of him, smash his personality, and compel him, in effect, to conform or die. Since organizations appear to be growing larger and more powerful all the time, the future, according to this view, threatens to turn us all into that most contemptible of creatures, spineless and faceless, the organization man.

It is difficult to overestimate the force with which this pessimistic prophecy grips the popular mind, especially among young people. Hammered into their heads by a stream of movies, plays and books, fed by a prestigious line of authors from Kafka and Orwell to Whyte, Marcuse and Ellul, the fear of bureaucracy permeates their thought. In the United States everyone "knows" that it is just such faceless bureaucrats who invent all-digit telephone numbers, who send out cards marked "do not fold, spindle or mutilate," who ruthlessly dehumanize students, and whom you cannot fight at City Hall. The fear of being swallowed up by this mechanized beast drives executives to orgies of self-examination and students to paroxysms of protest.

What makes the entire subject so emotional is the fact that organization is an inescapable part of all our lives. Like his links with things, places and people, man's organizational relationships are basic situational components. Just as every act in a man's life occurs in some definite geographical place, so does it also occur in an organizational place, a particular location in the invisible geography of human organization.

Thus, if the orthodox social critics are correct in predicting a regimented, superbureaucratized future, we should already be mounting the barricades, punching random holes in our IBM cards, taking every opportunity to wreck the machinery of organization. If, however, we set our conceptual clichés aside and turn instead to the facts, we discover that bureaucracy, the very system that is supposed to crush us all under its weight, is itself groaning with change.

The kinds of organizations these critics project unthinkingly into the future are precisely those least likely to dominate tomorrow. For we are witnessing not the triumph, but the breakdown of bureaucracy. We are, in fact, witnessing the arrival of a new organizational system that will increasingly challenge, and ultimately supplant bureaucracy. This is the organization of the future. I call it "Ad-hocracy."

Man will encounter plenty of difficulty in adapting to this new style organization. But instead of being trapped in some unchanging, personality-smashing niche, man will find himself liberated, a stranger in a new free-form world of kinetic organizations. In this alien landscape, his position will be constantly changing, fluid, and varied. And his organizational ties, like his ties with things, places and people, will turn over at a frenetic and everaccelerating rate.

Before we can grasp the meaning of this odd term, Ad-hocracy, we need to recognize that not all organizations are bureaucracies. There are alternative ways of organizing people. Bureaucracy, as Max Weber pointed out, did not become the dominant mode of human organization in the West until the arrival of industrialism.

This is not the place for a detailed description of all the characteristics of bureaucracy, but it is important for us to note three basic facts. First, in this particular system of organization, the individual has traditionally occupied a sharply defined slot in a division of labor. Second, he fit into a vertical hierarchy, a chain of command running from the boss down to the lowliest menial. Third, his organizational relationships, as Weber emphasized, tended toward permanence.

Each individual, therefore, filled a precisely positioned slot, a fixed position in a more or less fixed environment. He knew exactly where his department ended and the next began; the lines between organizations and their sub-structures were anchored firmly in place. In joining an organization, the individual accepted a set of fixed obligations in return for a specified set of rewards. These obligations and rewards remained the same over relatively long spans of time. The individual thus stepped into a comparatively permanent web of relationships – not merely with other people (who also tended to remain in their slots for a long time) – but with the organizational framework, the structure, itself.

Some of these structures are more durable than others. The Catholic Church is a steel frame that has lasted for 2000 years, with some of its internal sub-structures virtually unchanged for centuries at a time. In contrast, the Nazi Party of Germany managed to bathe Europe in blood, yet it existed as a formal organization for less than a quarter of a century.

In turn, just as organizations endure for longer or shorter periods, so, too, does an individual's relationship with any specific organizational structure. Thus man's tie to a particular department, division, political party, regiment, club, or other such unit has a beginning and an end in time. The same is true of his membership in informal organizations – cliques, factions, coffee-break groups and the like. His tie begins when he assumes the obligations of membership by joining or being conscripted into an organization. His tie ends when he quits or is discharged from it – or when the organization, itself, ceases to be.

This is what happens, of course, when an organization disbands formally. It happens when the members simply lose interest and stop coming around. But the organization can "cease to be" in another sense, too. An organization, after all, is nothing more than a collection of human objectives, expectations, and obligations. It is, in other words, a structure of roles filled by humans. And when a reorganization sharply alters this structure by redefining or redistributing these roles, we can say that the old organization has died and a new one has sprung up to take its place. This is true even if it retains the old name and has the same members as before. The rearrangement of roles creates a new structure exactly as the rearrangement of mobile walls in a building converts it into a new structure.

A relationship between a person and an organization, therefore, is broken either by his departure from it, or by its dissolution, or by its transformation through reorganization. When the latter – reorganization – happens, the individual, in effect, severs his links with the old, familiar, but now no longer extant structure, and assumes a relationship to the new one that supersedes it.

Today there is mounting evidence that the duration of man's organizational relationships is shrinking, that these relationships are turning over at a faster and faster rate. And we shall see that several powerful forces, including this seemingly simple fact, doom bureaucracy to destruction.

There was a time when a table of organization – sometimes familiarly known as a "T/O" – showed a neatly arrayed series of boxes, each indicating an officer and the organizational sub-units for which he was responsible. Every bureaucracy of any size, whether a corporation, a university or a government agency, had its own T/O, providing its managers with a detailed map of the organizational geography. Once drawn, such a map became a fixed part of the organization's rule book, remaining in use for years at a time. Today, organizational lines are changing so frequently that a three-month-old table is often regarded as an historic artifact, something like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Organizations now change their internal shape with a frequency – and sometime a rashness – that makes the head swim. Titles change from week to week. Jobs are transformed. Responsibilities shift. Vast organizational structures are taken apart, bolted together again in new forms, then rearranged again. Departments and divisions spring up overnight only to vanish in another, and yet another, reorganization.

In part, this frenzied reshuffling arises from the tide of mergers and "de-mergers" now sweeping through industry in the United States and Western Europe. The late sixties saw a tremendous rolling wave of acquisitions, the growth of giant conglomerates and diversified corporate monsters. The seventies may witness an equally powerful wave of divestitures and, later, reacquisitions, as companies attempt to consolidate and digest their new subsidiaries, then trade off troublesome components. Between 1967 and 1969 the Questor Corporation (formerly Dunhill International, Incorporated) bought eight companies and sold off five. Scores of other corporations have similar stories to tell. According to management consultant Alan J. Zakon, "there will be a great deal more spinning off of pieces." As the consumer marketplace churns and changes, companies will be forced constantly to reposition themselves in it.

Internal reorganizations almost inevitably follow such corporate swaps, but they may arise for a variety of other reasons as well. Within a recent three-year period fully sixty-six of the 100 largest industrial companies in the United States publicly reported major organizational shake-ups. Actually, this was only the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg. Many more reorganizations occur than are ever reported. Most companies try to avoid publicity when overhauling their organization. Moreover, constant small and partial reorganizations occur at the departmental or divisional level or below, and are regarded as too small or unimportant to report.

"My own observation as a consultant," says D. R. Daniel, an official of McKinsey & Company, a large management consulting firm, "is that one major restructuring every two years is probably a conservative estimate of the current rate of organizational change among the largest industrial corporations. Our firm has conducted over 200 organization studies for domestic corporate clients in the past year, and organization problems are an even larger part of our practice outside the United States." What's more, he adds, there are no signs of a leveling off. If anything, the frequency of organizational upheavals is increasing.

These changes, moreover, are increasingly far-reaching in power and scope. Says Professor L. E. Greiner of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration: "Whereas only a few years ago the target of organization change was limited to a small work group or a single department ... the focus is now converging on the organization as a whole, reaching out to include many divisions and levels at once, and even the top managers themselves." He refers to "revolutionary attempts" to transform organization "at all levels of management."

If the once-fixed table of organization won't hold still in industry, much the same is increasingly true of the great government agencies as well. There is scarcely an important department or ministry in the governments of the technological nations that has not undergone successive organizational change in recent years. In the United States during the forty-year span from 1913 to 1953, despite depression, war and other social upheavals, not a single new cabinet-level department was added to the government. Yet in 1953 Congress created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1965 it established the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1967 it set up the Department of Transportation (thus consolidating activities formerly carried out in thirty different agencies,) and, at about the same time, the President called for a merger of the departments of Labor and Commerce.

Such changes within the structure of government are only the most conspicuous, for organizational tremors are similarly felt in all the agencies down below. Indeed, internal redesign has become a byword in Washington. In 1965 when John Gardner became Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, a top-to-bottom reorganization shook that department. Agencies, bureaus and offices were realigned at a rate that left veteran employees in a state of mental exhaustion. (During the height of this reshuffling, one official, who happens to be a friend of mine, used to leave a note behind for her husband each morning when she left for work. The note consisted of her telephone number for that day. So rapid were the changes that she could not keep a telephone number long enough for it to be listed in the departmental directory.) Mr. Gardner's successors continued tinkering with organization, and by 1969, Robert Finch, after eleven months in office, was pressing for yet another major overhaul, having concluded in the meantime that the department was virtually unmanageable in the form in which he found it.

In Self-Renewal, an influential little book written before he entered the government, Gardner asserted that: "The farsighted administrator ... reorganizes to break down calcified organizational lines. He shifts personnel ... He redefines jobs to break them out of rigid categories." Elsewhere Gardner referred to the "crises of organization" in government and suggested that, in both the public and private sectors, "Most organizations have a structure that was designed to solve problems that no longer exist." The "self-renewing" organization, he defined as one that constantly changes its structure in response to changing needs.

Gardner's message amounts to a call for permanent revolution in organizational life, and more and more sophisticated managers are recognizing that in a world of accelerating change reorganization is, and must be, an on-going process, rather than a traumatic once-in-alifetime affair. This recognition is spreading outside the corporations and government agencies as well. Thus The New York Times, on the same day that it reports on proposed mergers in the plastics, plywood and paper industries, describes a major administrative upheaval at the British Broadcasting Corporation, a thorough renovation of the structure of Columbia University, and even a complete reorganization of that most conservative of institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What is involved in all this activity is not a casual tendency but a historic movement. Organizational change – selfrenewal, as Gardner puts it – is a necessary, an unavoidable response to the acceleration of change.

For the individual within these organizations, change creates a wholly new climate and a new set of problems. The turnover of organizational designs means that the individual's relationship to any one structure (with its implied set of obligations and rewards) is truncated, shortened in time. With each change, he must reorient himself. Today the average individual is frequently reassigned, shuffled about from one sub-structure to another. But even if he remains in the same department, he often finds that the department, itself, has been shifted on some fast-changing table of organization, so that his position in the overall maze is no longer the same.

The result is that man's organizational relationships today tend to change at a faster pace than ever before. The average relationship is less permanent, more temporary, than ever before.

The high rate of turnover is most dramatically symbolized by the rapid rise of what executives call "project" or "task-force" management. Here teams are assembled to solve specific short-term problems. Then, exactly like the mobile playgrounds, they are disassembled and their human components reassigned. Sometimes these teams are thrown together to serve only for a few days. Sometimes they are intended to last a few years. But unlike the functional departments or divisions of a traditional bureaucratic organization, which are presumed to be permanent, the project or task-force team is temporary by design.

When Lockheed Aircraft Corporation won a controversial contract to build fifty-eight giant C-5A military air transports, it created a whole new 11,000-man organization specifically for that purpose. To complete the multi-billion-dollar job, Lockheed had to coordinate the work not only of its own people, but of hundreds of subcontracting firms. In all, 6000 companies are involved in producing the more than 120,000 parts needed for each of these enormous airplanes. The Lockheed project organization created for this purpose has its own management and its own complex internal structure.

The first of the C-5A's rolled out of the shop exactly on schedule in March, 1969, twenty-nine months after award of the contract. The last of the fifty-eight transports was due to be delivered two years later. This meant that the entire imposing organization created for this job had a planned life span of five years. What we see here is nothing less than the creation of a disposable division – the organizational equivalent of paper dresses or throwaway tissues.

Project organization is widespread in the aerospace industries. When a leading manufacturer set out to win a certain large contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, it assembled a team of approximately one hundred people borrowed from various functional divisions of the company. The project team worked for about a year and a half to gather data and analyze the job even before the government formally requested bids. When the time came to prepare a formal bid – a "proposal," as it is known in the industry – the "preproposal project team" was dissolved and its members sent back to their functional divisions. A new team was brought into being to write the actual proposal. Proposal-writing teams often work together for a few weeks. Once the proposal is submitted, however, the proposal team is also disbanded. When the contract is won (if it is), new teams are successively established for development, and, ultimately, production of the goods required. Some individuals may move along with the job, joining each successive project team. Typically, however, people are brought in to work on only one or a few stages of the job.

While this form of organization is widely identified with aerospace companies, it is increasingly employed in more traditional industries as well. It is used when the task to be accomplished is non-routine, when it is, in effect, a one-time proposition.

"In just a few years," says Business Week, "the project manager has become commonplace." Indeed, project management has, itself, become recognized as a specialized executive art, and there is a small, but growing band of managers, both in the United States and Europe, who move from project to project, company to company, never settling down to run routine or long-term operations. Books on project and task-force management are beginning to appear. And the United States Air Force Systems Command at Dayton, Ohio, runs a school to train executives for project management.

Task forces and other ad hoc groups are now proliferating throughout the government and business bureaucracies, both in the United States and abroad. Transient teams, whose members come together to solve a specific problem and then separate, are particularly characteristic of science and help account for the kinetic quality of the scientific community. Its members are constantly on the move, organizationally, if not geographically.

George Kozmetsky, co-founder of Teledyne, Incorporated, and now dean of the school of business at the University of Texas, distinguishes between "routine" and "non-routine" organizations. The latter grapple most frequently with one-of-a-kind problems. He cites statistics to show that the non-routine sector, in which he brackets government and many of the advanced technology companies, is growing so fast that it will employ 65 percent of the total United States work force by the year 2001. Organizations in this sector are precisely the ones that rely most heavily on transient teams and task forces.

Clearly, there is nothing new about the idea of assembling a group to work toward the solution of a specific problem, then dismantling it when the task is completed. What is new is the frequency with which organizations must resort to such temporary arrangements. The seemingly permanent structures of many large organizations, often because they resist change, are now heavily infiltrated with these transient cells.

On the surface, the rise of temporary organization may seem insignificant. Yet this mode of operation plays havoc with the traditional conception of organization as consisting of more or less permanent structures. Throw-away organizations, ad hoc teams or committees, do not necessarily replace permanent functional structures, but they change them beyond recognition, draining them of both people and power. Today while functional divisions continue to exist, more and more project teams, task forces and similar organizational structures spring up in their midst, then disappear. And people, instead of filling fixed slots in the functional organization, move back and forth at a high rate of speed. They often retain their functional "home base" but are detached repeatedly to serve as temporary team members.

We shall shortly see that this process, repeated often enough, alters the loyalties of the people involved; shakes up lines of authority; and accelerates the rate at which individuals are forced to adapt to organizational change. For the moment, however, it is important to recognize that the rise of ad hoc organization is a direct effect of the speed-up of change in society as a whole.

So long as a society is relatively stable and unchanging, the problems it presents to men tend to be routine and predictable. Organizations in such an environment can be relatively permanent. But when change is accelerated, more and more novel first-time problems arise, and traditional forms of organization prove inadequate to the new conditions. They can no longer cope. As long as this is so, says Dr. Donald A. Schon, president of the Organization for Social and Technical Innovation, we need to create "self-destroying organizations ... lots of autonomous, semi-attached units which can be spun off, destroyed, sold bye-bye, when the need for them has disappeared."

Traditional functional organization structures, created to meet predictable, non-novel conditions, prove incapable of responding effectively to radical changes in the environment. Thus temporary role structures are created as the whole organization struggles to preserve itself and keep growing. The process is exactly analogous to the trend toward modularism in architecture. We earlier defined modularism as the attempt to lend greater durability to a whole structure by shortening the life span of its components. This applies to organization as well, and it helps explain the rise of shortlived or throw-away, organization components.

As acceleration continues, organizational redesign becomes a continuing function. According to management consultant Bernard Muller-Thym, the new technology, combined with advanced management techniques, creates a totally new situation. "What is now within our grasp," he says, "is a kind of productive capability that is alive with intelligence, alive with information, so that at its maximum it is completely flexible; one could completely reorganize the plant from hour to hour if one wished to do so." And what is true of the plant is increasingly true of the organization as a whole.

In short, the organizational geography of super-industrial society can be expected to become increasingly kinetic, filled with turbulence and change. The more rapidly the environment changes, the shorter the life span of organization forms. In administrative structure, just as in architectural structure, we are moving from long-enduring to temporary forms, from permanence to transience. We are moving from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy.

In this way, the accelerative thrust translates itself into organization. Permanence, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, is undermined, and we are driven to a relentless conclusion: man's ties with the invisible geography of organization turn over more and more rapidly, exactly as do his relationships with things, places, and the human beings who people these ever-changing organizational structures. Just as the new nomads migrate from place to place, man increasingly migrates from organizational structure to organizational structure.

Something else is happening, too: a revolutionary shift in power relationships. Not only are large organizations forced both to change their internal structure and to create temporary units, but they are also finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their traditional chains-ofcommand.

It would be pollyannish to suggest that workers in industry or government today truly "participate" in the management of their enterprises – either in capitalist or, for that matter, in socialist and communist countries. Yet there is evidence that bureaucratic hierarchies, separating those who "make decisions" from those who merely carry them out, are being altered, side-stepped or broken.

This process is noticeable in industry where, according to Professor William H. Read of the Graduate School of Business at McGill University, "irresistible pressures" are battering hierarchical arrangements. "The central, crucial and important business of organizations," he declares, "is increasingly shifting from up and down to 'sideways.'" What is involved in such a shift is a virtual revolution in organizational structure – and human relations. For people communicating "sideways" – i.e., to others at approximately the same level of organization – behave differently, operate under very different pressures, than those who must communicate up and down a hierarchy.

To illustrate, let us look at a typical work setting in which a traditional bureaucratic hierarchy operates. While still a young man I worked for a couple of years as a millwright's helper in a foundry. Here, in a great dark cavern of a building, thousands of men labored to produce automobile crankcase castings. The scene was Dantesque – smoke and soot smeared our faces, black dirt covered the floors and filled the air, the pungent, choking smell of sulphur and burnt sand seared our nostrils. Overhead a creaking conveyor carried red hot castings and dripped hot sand on the men below. There were flashes of molten iron, the yellow flares of fires, and a lunatic cacophony of noises: men shouting, chains rattling, pug mills hammering, compressed air shrieking.

To a stranger the scene appeared chaotic. But those inside knew that everything was carefully organized. Bureaucratic order prevailed. Men did the same job over and over again. Rules governed every situation. And each man knew exactly where he stood in a vertical hierarchy that reached from the lowest-paid core paster up to the unseen "they" who populated the executive suites in another building.

In the immense shed where we worked, something was always going wrong. A bearing would burn out, a belt snap or a gear break. Whenever this happened in a section, work would screech to a halt, and frantic messages would begin to flow up and down the hierarchy. The worker nearest the breakdown would notify his foreman. He, in turn, would tell the production supervisor. The production supervisor would send word to the maintenance supervisor. The maintenance supervisor would dispatch a crew to repair the damage.

Information in this system is passed by the worker "upward" through the foreman to the production supervisor. The production supervisor carries it "sideways" to a man occupying a niche at approximately the same level in the hierarchy (the maintenance supervisor), who, in turn, passes it "downward" to the millwrights who actually get things going again. The information thus must move a total of four steps up and down the vertical ladder plus one step sideways before repairs can begin.

This system is premised on the unspoken assumption that the dirty, sweaty men down below cannot make sound decisions. Only those higher in the hierarchy are to be trusted with judgment or discretion. Officials at the top make the decisions; men at the bottom carry them out. One group represents the brains of the organization; the other, the hands.

This typically bureaucratic arrangement is ideally suited to solving routine problems at a moderate pace. But when things speed up, or the problems cease to be routine, chaos often breaks loose. It is easy to see why.

First, the acceleration of the pace of life (and especially the speed-up of production brought about by automation) means that every minute of "down time" costs more in lost output than ever before. Delay is increasingly costly. Information must flow faster than ever before. At the same time, rapid change, by increasing the number of novel, unexpected problems, increases the amount of information needed. It takes more information to cope with a novel problem than one we have solved a dozen or a hundred times before. It is this combined demand for more information at faster speeds that is now undermining the great vertical hierarchies so typical of bureaucracy.

A radical speed-up could have been effected in the foundry described above simply by allowing the worker to report the breakdown directly to the maintenance supervisor or even to a maintenance crew, instead of passing the news along through his foreman and production supervisor. At least one and perhaps two steps could have been cut from the four-step communication process in this way – a saving of from 25 to 50 percent. Significantly, the steps that might be eliminated are the up-and-down steps, the vertical ones.

Today such savings are feverishly sought by managers fighting to keep up with change. Shortcuts that by-pass the hierarchy are increasingly employed in thousands of factories, offices, laboratories, even in the military. The cumulative result of such small changes is a massive shift from vertical to lateral communication systems. The intended result is speedier communication. This leveling process, however, represents a major blow to the once-sacred bureaucratic hierarchy, and it punches a jagged hole in the "brain and hand" analogy. For as the vertical chain of command is increasingly by-passed, we find "hands" beginning to make decisions, too. When the worker by-passes his foreman or supervisor and calls in a repair team, he makes a decision that in the past was reserved for these "higher ups."

This silent but significant deterioration of hierarchy, now occurring in the executive suite as well as at the ground level of the factory floor, is intensified by the arrival on the scene of hordes of experts – specialists in vital fields so narrow that often the men on top have difficulty understanding them. Increasingly, managers have to rely on the judgment of these experts. Solid state physicists, computer programmers, systems designers, operation researchers, engineering specialists – such men are assuming a new decision-making function. At one time, they merely consulted with executives who reserved unto themselves the right to make managerial decisions. Today, the managers are losing their monopoly on decision-making.

More and more, says Professor Read of McGill, the "specialists do not fit neatly together into a chain-of-command system" and "cannot wait for their expert advice to be approved at a higher level." With no time for decisions to wend their leisurely way up and down the hierarchy, "advisors" stop merely advising and begin to make decisions themselves. Often they do this in direct consultation with the workers and ground-level technicians.

As a result, says Frank Metzger, director of personnel planning for International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, "You no longer have the strict allegiance to hierarchy. You may have five or six different levels of the hierarchy represented in one meeting. You try to forget about salary level and hierarchy, and organize to get the job done."

Such facts, according to Professor Read, "represent a staggering change in thinking, action, and decision-making in organizations." Quite possibly, he declares, "the only truly effective methods for preventing, or coping with, problems of coordination and communication in our changing technology will be found in new arrangements of people and tasks, in arrangements which sharply break with the bureaucratic tradition."

It will be a long time before the last bureaucratic hierarchy is obliterated. For bureaucracies are well suited to tasks that require masses of moderately educated men to perform routine operations, and, no doubt, some such operations will continue to be performed by men in the future. Yet it is precisely such tasks that the computer and automated equipment do far better than men. It is clear that in super-industrial society many such tasks will be performed by great self-regulating systems of machines, doing away with the need for bureaucratic organization. Far from fastening the grip of bureaucracy on civilization more tightly than before, automation leads to its overthrow.

As machines take over routine tasks and the accelerative thrust increases the amount of novelty in the environment, more and more of the energy of society (and its organizations) must turn toward the solution of non-routine problems. This requires a degree of imagination and creativity that bureaucracy, with its man-in-a-slot organization, its permanent structures, and its hierarchies, is not well equipped to provide. Thus it is not surprising to find that wherever organizations today are caught up in the stream of technological or social change, wherever research and development is important, wherever men must cope with first-time problems, the decline of bureaucratic forms is most pronounced. In these frontier organizations a new system of human relations is springing up.

To live, organizations must cast off those bureaucratic practices that immobilize them, making them less sensitive and less rapidly responsive to change. The result, according to Joseph A. Raffaele, Professor of Economics at Drexel Institute of Technology, is that we are moving toward a "working society of technical co-equals" in which the "line of demarcation between the leader and the led has become fuzzy." Super-industrial Man, rather than occupying a permanent, cleanly-defined slot and performing mindless routine tasks in response to orders from above, finds increasingly that he must assume decision-making responsibility – and must do so within a kaleidoscopically changing organization structure built upon highly transient human relationships. Whatever else might be said, this is not the old, familiar Weberian bureaucracy at which so many of our novelists and social critics are still, belatedly, hurling their rusty javelins.

If it was Max Weber who first defined bureaucracy and predicted its triumph, Warren Bennis may go down in sociological textbooks as the man who first convincingly predicted its demise and sketched the outlines of the organizations that are springing up to replace it. At precisely the moment when the outcry against bureaucracy was reaching its peak of shrillness on American campuses and elsewhere, Bennis, a social psychologist and professor of industrial management, predicted flatly that "in the next twenty-five to fifty years" we will all "participate in the end of bureaucracy." He urged us to begin looking "beyond bureaucracy."

Thus Bennis argues that "while various proponents of 'good human relations' have been fighting bureaucracy on humanistic grounds and for Christian values, bureaucracy seems most likely to founder on its inability to adapt to rapid change ...

"Bureaucracy," he says, "thrives in a highly competitive undifferentiated and stable environment, such as the climate of its youth, the Industrial Revolution. A pyramidal structure of authority, with power concentrated in the hands of a few ... was, and is, an eminently suitable social arrangement for routinized tasks. However, the environment has changed in just those ways which make the mechanism most problematic. Stability has vanished."

Each age produces a form of organization appropriate to its own tempo. During the long epoch of agricultural civilization, societies were marked by low transience. Delays in communication and transportation slowed the rate at which information moved. The pace of individual life was comparatively slow. And organizations were seldom called upon to make what we would regard as high-speed decisions.

The age of industrialism brought a quickened tempo to both individual and organizational life. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that bureaucratic forms were needed. For all that they seem lumbering and inefficient to us, they were, on the average, capable of making better decisions faster than the loose and ramshackle organizations that preceded them. With all the rules codified, with a set of fixed principles indicating how to deal with various work problems, the flow of decisions could be accelerated to keep up with the faster pace of life brought by industrialism.

Weber was keen enough to notice this, and he pointed out that "The extraordinary increase in the speed by which public announcements, as well as economic and political facts are transmitted exerts a steady and sharp pressure in the direction of speeding up the tempo of administrative reaction ..." He was mistaken, however, when he said "The optimum of such reaction time is normally attained only by a strictly bureaucratic organization." For it is now clear that the acceleration of change has reached so rapid a pace that even bureaucracy can no longer keep up. Information surges through society so rapidly, drastic changes in technology come so quickly that newer, even more instantly responsive forms of organization must characterize the future.

What, then, will be the characteristics of the organizations of super-industrial society? "The key word," says Bennis, "will be 'temporary'; there will be adaptive, rapidly changing temporary systems." Problems will be solved by task forces composed of "relative strangers who represent a set of diverse professional skills."

Executives and managers in this system will function as coordinators between the various transient work teams. They will be skilled in understanding the jargon of different groups of specialists, and they will communicate across groups, translating and interpreting the language of one into the language of another. People in this system will, according to Bennis, "be differentiated not vertically, according to rank and role, but flexibly and functionally, according to skill and professional training."

Because of the high rate of movement back and forth from one transient team to another, he continues, "There will ... be a reduced commitment to work groups ... While skills in human interaction will become more important, due to the growing needs for collaboration in complex tasks, there will be a concomitant reduction in group cohesiveness ... People will have to learn to develop quick and intense relationships on the job, and learn to bear the loss of more enduring work relationships."

This then is a picture of the coming Ad-hocracy, the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals. From this sketch, moreover, it is possible to deduce some of the characteristics of the human beings who will populate these new organizations – and who, to some extent, are already to be found in the prototype organizations of today. What emerges is dramatically different from the stereotype of the organization man. For just as the acceleration of change and increased novelty in the environment demand a new form of organization, they demand, too, a new kind of man.

Three of the outstanding characteristics of bureaucracy were, as we have seen, permanence, hierarchy, and a division of labor. These characteristics molded the human beings who manned the organizations. Permanence – the recognition that the link between man and organization would endure through time – brought with it a commitment to the organization. The longer the man stayed within its embrace, the more he saw his past as an investment in the organization, the more he saw his personal future as dependent upon that of the organization. Longevity bred loyalty. In work organizations, this natural tendency was powerfully reinforced by the knowledge that termination of one's links with the organization very often meant a loss of the means of economic survival. In a world wracked by scarcity for the many, a job was precious. The bureaucrat was thus immobile and deeply oriented toward economic security. To keep his job, he willingly subordinated his own interests and convictions to those of the organization.

Power-laden hierarchies, through which authority flowed, wielded the whip by which the individual was held in line. Knowing that his relationship with the organization would be relatively permanent (or at least hoping that it would be) the organization man looked within for approval. Rewards and punishments came down the hierarchy to the individual, so that the individual, habitually looking upward at the next rung of the hierarchical ladder, became conditioned to subservience. Thus: the wishy-washy organization man – the man without personal convictions (or without the courage to make them evident). It paid to conform.

Finally, the organization man needed to understand his place in the scheme of things; he occupied a well-defined niche, performed actions that were also well-defined by the rules of the organization, and he was judged by the precision with which he followed the book. Faced by relatively routine problems, he was encouraged to seek routine answers. Unorthodoxy, creativity, venturesomeness were discouraged, for they interfered with the predictability required by the organization of its component parts.

The embryonic Ad-hocracies of today demand a radically different constellation of human characteristics. In place of permanence, we find transience – high mobility between organizations, never-ending reorganizations within them, and a constant generation and decay of temporary work groupings. Not surprisingly, we witness a decline in old-fashioned "loyalty" to the organization and its sub-structures.

Writing about young executives in American industry today, Walter Guzzardi, Jr., declares: "The agreements between modern man and modern organization are not like the laws of the Medes and the Persians. They were not made to stand forever ... The man periodically examines his own attitude toward the organization, and gauges its attitude toward him. If he doesn't like what he sees, he tries to change it. If he can't change it, he moves." Says executive recruiter George Peck: "The number of top executives with their résumés in their desk drawer is amazing."

The old loyalty felt by the organization man appears to be going up in smoke. In its place we are watching the rise of professional loyalty. In all of the techno-societies there is a relentless increase in the number of professional, technical and other specialists. In the United States between 1950 and 1969 alone, their number has more than doubled and this class continues to grow more rapidly than any other group in the work force. Instead of operating as individual, entrepreneurial free lancers, millions of engineers, scientists, psychologists, accountants and other professionals have entered the ranks of organization. What has happened as a result is a neat dialectical reversal. Veblen wrote about the industrialization of the professional. Today we are observing the professionalization of industry.

Thus John Gardner declares: "The loyalty of the professional man is to his profession and not to the organization that may house him at any given moment. Compare the chemist or electronics engineer in a local plant with the non-professional executives in the same plant. The men the chemist thinks of as his colleagues are not those who occupy neighboring offices, but his fellow professionals wherever they may be throughout the country, even throughout the world. Because of his fraternal ties with widely dispersed contemporaries, he himself is highly mobile. But even if he stays in one place his loyalty to the local organization is rarely of the same quality as that of the true organization man. He never quite believes in it.

"The rise of the professions means that modern large-scale organization has been heavily infiltrated by men who have an entirely different concept of what organization is about ..." In effect, these men are "outsiders" working within the system.

At the same time, the term "profession" is itself taking on new meaning. Just as the vertical hierarchies of bureaucracy break down under the combined impact of new technology, new knowledge, and social change, so too, do the horizontal hierarchies that have until now divided human knowledge. The old boundaries between specialties are collapsing. Men increasingly find that the novel problems thrust at them can be solved only by reaching beyond narrow disciplines.

The traditional bureaucrat put electrical engineers in one compartment and psychologists in another. Indeed, engineers and psychologists in their own professional organizations assumed an airtight distinction between their spheres of knowledge and competence. Today, however, in the aerospace industry, in education, and in other fields, engineers and psychologists are frequently thrown together in transient teams. New organizations reflecting these sometimes exotic intellectual mergers are springing up all around the basic professions, so that we begin to find sub-groupings of bio-mathematicians, psycho-pharmacologists, engineer-librarians and computer-musicians. Distinctions between the disciplines do not disappear; but they become finer, more porous, and there is a constant reshuffling process.

In this situation, even professional loyalties turn into short-term commitments, and the work itself, the task to be done, the problem to be solved, begins to elicit the kind of commitment hitherto reserved for the organization. Professional specialists, according to Bennis, "seemingly derive their rewards from inward standards of excellence, from their professional societies, and from the intrinsic satisfaction of their task. In fact, they are committed to the task, not the job; to their standards, not their boss. And because they have degrees, they travel. They are not good 'company men'; they are uncommitted except to the challenging environments where they can 'play with problems.'"

These men of the future already man some of the Ad-hocracies that exist today. There is excitement and creativity in the computer industry, in educational technology, in the application of systems techniques to urban problems, in the new oceanography industry, in government agencies concerned with environmental health, and elsewhere. In each of these fields, more representative of the future than the past, there is a new venturesome spirit which stands in total contrast to the security-minded orthodoxy and conformity associated with the organization man.

The new spirit in these transient organizations is closer to that of the entrepreneur than the organization man. The free-swinging entrepreneur who started up vast enterprises unafraid of defeat or adverse opinion, is a folk hero of industrialism, particularly in the United States. Pareto labeled the entrepreneurs "adventurous souls, hungry for novelty ... not at all alarmed at change."

It is conventional wisdom to assert that the age of the entrepreneur is dead, and that in his place there now stand only organization men or bureaucrats. Yet what is happening today is a resurgence of entrepreneurialism within the heart of large organizations. The secret behind this reversal is the new transience and the death of economic insecurity for large masses of educated men. With the rise of affluence has come a new willingness to take risks. Men are willing to risk failure because they cannot believe they will ever starve. Thus says Charles Elwell, director of industrial relations for Hunt Foods: "Executives look at themselves as individual entrepreneurs who are selling their knowledge and skills." Indeed, as Max Ways has pointed out in Fortune: "The professional man in management has a powerful base of independence – perhaps a firmer base than the small businessman ever had in his property rights."

Thus we find the emergence of a new kind of organization man – a man who, despite his many affiliations, remains basically uncommitted to any organization. He is willing to employ his skills and creative energies to solve problems with equipment provided by the organization, and within temporary groups established by it. But he does so only so long as the problems interest him. He is committed to his own career, his own self-fulfillment.

It is no accident, in light of the above, that the term "associate" seems suddenly to have become extremely popular in large organizations. We now have "associate marketing directors" and "research associates," and even government agencies are filled with "associate directors" and "associate administrators." The word associate implies co-equal, rather than subordinate, and its spreading use accurately reflects the shift from vertical and hierarchical arrangements to the new, more lateral, communication patterns.

Where the organization man was subservient to the organization, Associative Man is almost insouciant toward it. Where the organization man was immobilized by concern for economic security, Associative Man increasingly takes it for granted. Where the organization man was fearful of risk, Associative Man welcomes it (knowing that in an affluent and fastchanging society even failure is transient). Where the organization man was hierarchyconscious, seeking status and prestige within the organization, Associative Man seeks it without. Where the organization man filled a predetermined slot, Associative Man moves from slot to slot in a complex pattern that is largely self-motivated. Where the organization man dedicated himself to the solution of routine problems according to well-defined rules, avoiding any show of unorthodoxy or creativity, Associative Man, faced by novel problems, is encouraged to innovate. Where the organization man had to subordinate his own individuality to "play ball on the team," Associative Man recognizes that the team, itself, is transient. He may subordinate his individuality for a while, under conditions of his own choosing; but it is never a permanent submergence.

In all this, Associative Man bears with him a secret knowledge: the very temporariness of his relationships with organization frees him from many of the bonds that constricted his predecessor. Transience, in this sense, is liberating.

Yet there is another side of the coin, and he knows this, as well. For the turnover of relationships with formal organizational structures brings with it an increased turnover of informal organization and a faster through-put of people as well. Each change brings with it a need for new learning. He must learn the rules of the game. But the rules keep changing. The introduction of Ad-hocracy increases the adaptability of organizations; but it strains the adaptability of men. Thus Tom Burns, after a study of the British electronics industry, finds a disturbing contrast between managers in stable organizational structures and those who find themselves where change is most rapid. Frequent adaptation, he reports, "happened at the cost of personal satisfaction and adjustment. The difference in the personal tension of people in the top management positions and those of the same age who had reached a similar position in a more stable situation was marked." And Bennis declares: "Coping with rapid change, living in the temporary work systems, setting up (in quick-step time) meaningful relations – and then breaking them – all augur social strains and psychological tensions."

It is possible that for many people, in their organizational relationships as in other spheres, the future is arriving too soon. For the individual, the move toward Ad-hocracy means a sharp acceleration in the turnover of organizational relationships in his life. Thus another piece falls into place in our study of hightransience society. It becomes clear that acceleration telescopes our ties with organization in much the same way that it truncates our relationships with things, places and people. The increased turnover of all these relationships places a heavy adaptive burden on individuals reared and educated for life in a slower-paced social system.

It is here that the danger of future shock lies. This danger, as we shall now see, is intensified by the impact of the accelerative thrust in the realm of information.

Chapter 8 INFORMATION: THE KINETIC IMAGE

In a society in which instant food, instant education and even instant cities are everyday phenomena, no product is more swiftly fabricated or more ruthlessly destroyed than the instant celebrity. Nations advancing toward super-industrialism sharply step up their output of these "psycho-economic" products. Instant celebrities burst upon the consciousness of millions like an image-bomb – which is exactly what they are.

Within less than one year from the time a Cockney girl-child nicknamed "Twiggy" took her first modelling job, millions of human beings around the globe stored mental images of her in their brain. A dewy-eyed blonde with minimal mammaries and pipestem legs, Twiggy exploded into celebrityhood in 1967. Her winsome face and malnourished figure suddenly appeared on the covers of magazines in Britain, America, France, Italy and other countries. Overnight, Twiggy eyelashes, mannikins, perfumes and clothes began to gush from the fad mills. Critics pontificated about her social significance. Newsmen accorded her the kind of coverage normally reserved for a peace treaty or a papal election.

By now, however, our stored mental images of Twiggy have been largely erased. She has all but vanished from public view. Reality has confirmed her own shrewd estimate that "I may not be around here for another six months." For images, too, have become increasingly transient – and not only the images of models, athletes or entertainers. Not long ago I asked a highly intelligent teenager whether she and her classmates had any heroes. I said, "Do you regard John Glenn, for example, as a hero?" (Glenn being, lest the reader has forgotten, the first American astronaut to orbit in space.) The child's response was revealing. "No," she said, "he's too old."

At first I thought she regarded a man in his forties as being too old to be a hero. Soon I realized this was mistaken. What she meant was that Glenn's exploits had taken place too long ago to be of interest. (John H. Glenn's history-making flight occurred in February, 1962.) Today Glenn has receded from the foreground of public attention. In effect, his image has decayed.

Twiggy, the Beatles, John Glenn, Billie Sol Estes, Bob Dylan, Jack Ruby, Norman Mailer, Eichmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georgi Malenkov, Jacqueline Kennedy – thousands of "personalities" parade across the stage of contemporary history. Real people, magnified and projected by the mass media, they are stored as images in the minds of millions of people who have never met them, never spoken to them, never seen them "in person." They take on a reality almost as (and sometimes even more) intense than that of many people with whom we do have "in-person" relationships.

We form relationships with these "vicarious people," just as we do with friends, neighbors and colleagues. And just as the through-put of real, in-person people in our lives is increasing, and the duration of our average relationship with them decreasing, the same is true of our ties with the vicarious people who populate our minds.

Their rate of flow-through is influenced by the real rate of change in the world. Thus, in politics, for example, we find that the British prime ministership has been turning over since 1922 at a rate some 13 percent faster than in the base period 1721-1922. In sports, the heavyweight boxing championship now changes hands twice as fast as it did during our father's youth. (Between 1882 and 1932, there were ten new world heavyweight boxing champions, each holding the crown an average of 5 years. Between 1932 and 1951, there were 7 champions, each with an average tenure of 3.2 years. From 1951 to 1967, when the World Boxing Association declared the title vacant, 7 men held the championship for an average of 2.3 years each.) Events, moving faster, constantly throw new personalities into the charmed circle of celebrityhood, and old images in the mind decay to make way for the new.

The same might be said for the fictional characters spewed out from the pages of books, from television screens, theaters, movies and magazines. No previous generation in history has had so many fictional characters flung at it. Commenting on the mass media, historian Marshall Fishwick wryly declares: "We may not even get used to Super-Hero, Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific before they fly off our television screens forever."

These vicarious people, both live and fictional, play a significant role in our lives, providing models for behavior, acting out for us various roles and situations from which we draw conclusions about our own lives. We deduce lessons from their activities, consciously or not. We learn from their triumphs and tribulations. They make it possible for us to "try on" various roles or life styles without suffering the consequences that might attend such experiments in real life. The accelerated flow-through of vicarious people cannot but contribute to the instability of personality patterns among many real people who have difficulty in finding a suitable life style.

These vicarious people, however, are not independent of one another. They perform their roles in a vast, complexly organized "public drama" which is, in the words of sociologist Orrin Klapp, author of a fascinating book called Symbolic Leaders, largely a product of the new communications technology. This public drama, in which celebrities upstage and replace celebrities at an accelerating rate, has the effect, according to Klapp, of making leadership "more unstable than it would be otherwise. Contretemps, upsets, follies, contests, scandals, make a feast of entertainment or a spinning political roulette wheel. Fads come and go at a dizzying pace ... A country like the United States has an open public drama, in which new faces appear daily, there is always a contest to steal the show, and almost anything can happen and often does." What we are observing, says Klapp, is a "rapid turnover of symbolic leaders."

This can be extended, however, into a far more powerful statement: what is happening is not merely a turnover of real people or even fictional characters, but a more rapid turnover of the images and image-structures in our brains. Our relationships with these images of reality, upon which we base our behavior, are growing, on average, more and more transient. The entire knowledge system in society is undergoing violent upheaval. The very concepts and codes in terms of which we think are turning over at a furious and accelerating pace. We are increasing the rate at which we must form and forget our images of reality.

Every person carries within his head a mental model of the world – a subjective representation of external reality. This model consists of tens upon tens of thousands of images. These may be as simple as a mental picture of clouds scudding across the sky. Or they may be abstract inferences about the way things are organized in society. We may think of this mental model as a fantastic internal warehouse, an image emporium in which we store our inner portraits of Twiggy, Charles De Gaulle or Cassius Clay, along with such sweeping propositions as "Man is basically good" or "God is dead."

Any person's mental model will contain some images that approximate reality closely, along with others that are distorted or inaccurate. But for the person to function, even to survive, the model must bear some overall resemblance to reality. As V. Gordon Childe has written in Society and Knowledge, "Every reproduction of the external world, constructed and used as a guide to action by an historical society, must in some degree correspond to that reality. Otherwise the society could not have maintained itself; its members, if acting in accordance with totally untrue propositions, would not have succeeded in making even the simplest tools and in securing therewith food and shelter from the external world."

No man's model of reality is a purely personal product. While some of his images are based on firsthand observation, an increasing proportion of them today are based on messages beamed to us by the mass media and the people around us. Thus the degree of accuracy in his model to some extent reflects the general level of knowledge in society. And as experience and scientific research pump more refined and accurate knowledge into society, new concepts, new ways of thinking, supersede, contradict, and render obsolete older ideas and world views.

If society itself were standing still, there might be little pressure on the individual to update his own supply of images, to bring them in line with the latest knowledge available in the society. So long as the society in which he is embedded is stable or slowly changing, the images on which he bases his behavior can also change slowly. But to function in a fastchanging society, to cope with swift and complex change, the individual must turn over his own stock of images at a rate that in some way correlates with the pace of change. His model must be updated. To the degree that it lags, his responses to change become inappropriate; he becomes increasingly thwarted, ineffective. Thus there is intense pressure on the individual to keep up with the generalized pace.

Today change is so swift and relentless in the techno-societies that yesterday's truths suddenly become today's fictions, and the most highly skilled and intelligent members of society admit difficulty in keeping up with the deluge of new knowledge – even in extremely narrow fields.

"You can't possibly keep in touch with all you want to," complains Dr. Rudolph Stohler, a zoologist at the University of California at Berkeley. "I spend 25 percent to 50 percent of my working time trying to keep up with what's going on," says Dr. I. E. Wallen, chief of oceanography at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Dr. Emilio Segre, a Nobel prizewinner in physics, declares: "On K-mesons alone, to wade through all the papers is an impossibility." And another oceanographer, Dr. Arthur Stump, admits: "I don't really know the answer unless we declare a moratorium on publications for ten years."

New knowledge either extends or outmodes the old. In either case it compels those for whom it is relevant to reorganize their store of images. It forces them to relearn today what they thought they knew yesterday. Thus Lord James, vice-chancellor of the University of York, says, "I took my first degree in chemistry at Oxford in 1931." Looking at the questions asked in chemistry exams at Oxford today, he continues, "I realize that not only can I not do them, but that I never could have done them, since at least two-thirds of the questions involve knowledge that simply did not exist when I graduated." And Dr. Robert Hilliard, the top educational broadcasting specialist for the Federal Communications Commission, presses the point further: "At the rate at which knowledge is growing, by the time the child born today graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the world will be four times as great. By the time that same child is fifty years old, it will be thirty-two times as great, and 97 percent of everything known in the world will have been learned since the time he was born."

Granting that definitions of "knowledge" are vague and that such statistics are necessarily hazardous, there still can be no question that the rising tide of new knowledge forces us into ever-narrower specialization and drives us to revise our inner images of reality at ever-faster rates. Nor does this refer merely to abstruse scientific information about physical particles or genetic structure. It applies with equal force to various categories of knowledge that closely affect the everyday life of millions.

Much new knowledge is admittedly remote from the immediate interests of the ordinary man in the street. He is not intrigued or impressed by the fact that a noble gas like xenon can form compounds – something that until recently most chemists swore was impossible. While even this knowledge may have an impact on him when it is embodied in new technology, until then, he can afford to ignore it. A good bit of new knowledge, on the other hand, is directly related to his immediate concerns, his job, his politics, his family life, even his sexual behavior.

A poignant example is the dilemma that parents find themselves in today as a consequence of successive radical changes in the image of the child in society and in our theories of childrearing.

At the turn of the century in the United States, for example, the dominant theory reflected the prevailing scientific belief in the primacy of heredity in determining behavior. Mothers who had never heard of Darwin or Spencer raised their babies in ways consistent with the world views of these thinkers. Vulgarized and simplified, passed from person to person, these world views were reflected in the conviction of millions of ordinary people that "bad children are a result of bad stock," that "crime is hereditary," etc.

In the early decades of the century, these attitudes fell back before the advance of environmentalism. The belief that environment shapes personality, and that the early years are the most important, created a new image of the child. The work of Watson and Pavlov began to creep into the public ken. Mothers reflected the new behaviorism, refusing to feed infants on demand, refusing to pick them up when they cried, weaning them early to avoid prolonged dependency.

A study by Martha Wolfenstein has compared the advice offered parents in seven successive editions of Infant Care, a handbook issued by the United States Children's Bureau between 1914 and 1951. She found distinct shifts in the preferred methods for dealing with weaning, thumb-sucking, masturbation, bowel and bladder training. It is clear from this study that by the late thirties still another image of the child had gained ascendancy. Freudian concepts swept in like a wave and revolutionized childrearing practices. Suddenly, mothers began to hear about "the rights of infants" and the need for "oral gratification." Permissiveness became the order of the day.

Parenthetically, at the same time that Freudian images of the child were altering the behavior of parents in Dayton, Dubuque and Dallas, the image of the psychoanalyst changed, too. Psychoanalysts became culture heroes. Movies, television scripts, novels and magazine stories represented them as wise and sympathetic souls, wonder-workers capable of remaking damaged personalities. From the appearance of the movie Spellbound in 1945, through the late fifties, the analyst was painted in largely positive terms by the mass media.

By the mid-sixties, however, he had already turned into a comical creature. Peter Sellers in What's New Pussycat? played a psychoanalyst much crazier than most of his patients, and "psychoanalyst jokes" began to circulate not merely among New York and California sophisticates, but through the population at large, helped along by the same mass media that created the myth of the analyst in the first place.

This sharp reversal in the public image of the psychoanalyst (the public image being no more than the weighted aggregate of private images in the society) reflected changes in research as well. For evidence was piling up that psychoanalytic therapy did not live up to the claims made for it, and new knowledge in the behavioral sciences, and particularly in psychopharmacology, made many Freudian therapeutic measures seem quaintly archaic. At the same time, there was a great burst of research in the field of learning theory, and a new swing in childrearing, this time toward a kind of neo-behaviorism, got under way.

At each stage of this development a widely held set of images was attacked by a set of counter-images. Individuals holding one set were assailed by reports, articles, documentaries, and advice from authorities, friends, relatives and even casual acquaintances who accepted conflicting views. The same mother, turning to the same authorities at two different times in the course of raising her child, would receive, in effect, somewhat different advice based on different inferences about reality. While for the people of the past, childrearing patterns remained stable for centuries at a time, for the people of the present and the future, it has, like so many other fields, become an arena in which successive waves of images, many of them generated by scientific research, do battle.

In this way, new knowledge alters old. The mass media instantly and persuasively disseminate new images, and ordinary individuals, seeking help in coping with an ever more complex social environment, attempt to keep up. At the same time, events – as distinct from research as such – also batter our old image structures. Racing swiftly past our attention screen, they wash out old images and generate new ones. After the freedom rides and the riots in black ghettos only the pathological could hang on to the long-cherished notion that blacks are "happy children" content with their poverty. After the Israeli blitz victory over the Arabs in 1967, how many still cling to the image of the Jew as a cheek-turning pacifist or a battlefield coward?

In education, in politics, in economic theory, in medicine, in international affairs, wave after wave of new images penetrate our defenses, shake up our mental models of reality. The result of this image bombardment is the accelerated decay of old images, a faster intellectual through-put, and a new, profound sense of the impermanence of knowledge, itself.

This impermanence is reflected in society in many subtle ways. A single dramatic example is the impact of the knowledge explosion on that classic knowledge-container, the book.

As knowledge has become more plentiful and less permanent, we have witnessed the virtual disappearance of the solid old durable leather binding, replaced at first by cloth and later by paper covers. The book itself, like much of the information it holds, has become more transient.

A decade ago, communications systems designer Sol Cornberg, a radical prophet in the field of library technology, declared that reading would soon cease to be a primary form of information intake. "Reading and writing," he suggested, "will become obsolete skills." (Ironically, Mr. Cornberg's wife is a novelist.)

Whether or not he is correct, one fact is plain: the incredible expansion of knowledge implies that each book (alas, this one included) contains a progressively smaller fraction of all that is known. And the paperback revolution, by making inexpensive editions available everywhere, lessens the scarcity value of the book at precisely the very moment that the increasingly rapid obsolescence of knowledge lessens its longterm informational value. Thus, in the United States a paperback appears simultaneously on more than 100,000 newsstands, only to be swept away by another tidal wave of publications delivered a mere thirty days later. The book thus approaches the transience of the monthly magazine. Indeed, many books are no more than "one-shot" magazines.

At the same time, the public's span of interest in a book – even a very popular book – is shrinking. Thus, for example, the life span of best sellers on The New York Times list is rapidly declining. There are marked irregularities from year to year, and some books manage to buck the tide. Nevertheless, if we examine the first four years for which full data on the subject is available, 1953-1956, and compare this with a similar period one decade later, 1963-1966, we find that the average best seller in the earlier period remained on the list a full 18.8 weeks. A decade later this had shrunk to 15.7 weeks. Within a ten-year-period, the life expectancy of the average best seller had shrunk by nearly one-sixth.

We can understand such trends only if we grasp the elemental underlying truth. We are witnessing an historic process that will inevitably change man's psyche. For across the board, from cosmetics to cosmology, from Twiggy-type trivia to the triumphant facts of technology, our inner images of reality, responding to the acceleration of change outside ourselves, are becoming shorter-lived, more temporary. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things and organizational forms, is becoming disposable.

If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli.

To understand why, we need first to examine the basic sources of imagery. Where do the thousands of images filed in our mental model come from? The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves – sound waves, light, etc. – strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images.

These incoming signals are of several types. Some might be called uncoded. Thus, for example, a man walks along a street and notices a leaf whipped along the sidewalk by the wind. He perceives this event through his sensory apparatus. He hears a rustling sound. He sees movement and greenness. He feels the wind. From these sensory perceptions he somehow forms a mental image. We can refer to these sensory signals as a message. But the message was not, in any ordinary sense of the term, man-made. It was not designed by anyone to communicate anything, and the man's understanding of it does not depend directly on a social code – a set of socially agreed-upon signs and definitions. We are all surrounded by and participate in such events. When they occur within range of our senses, we may pick up uncoded messages from them and convert these messages into mental images. In fact, some proportion of the images in every individual's mental model are derived from such uncoded messages.

But we also receive coded messages from outside ourselves. Coded messages are any which depend upon social convention for their meaning. All languages, whether based on words or gestures, drumbeats or dancesteps, hieroglyphs, pictographs or the arrangement of knots in a string, are codes. All messages conveyed by means of such languages are coded. We may speculate with some safety that as societies have grown larger and more complex, proliferating codes for the transmission of images from person to person, the ratio of uncoded messages received by the ordinary person has declined in favor of coded messages. We may guess, in other words, that today more of our imagery derives from man-made messages than from personal observation of raw, "uncoded" events.

Furthermore, we can discern a subtle but significant shift in the type of coded messages as well. For the illiterate villager in an agricultural society of the past, most of the incoming messages were what might be called casual or "do-it-yourself" communications. The peasant might engage in ordinary household conversation, banter, cracker-barrel or tavern talk, griping, complaining, boasting, baby talk, (and, in the same sense, animal talk), etc. This determined the nature of most of the coded messages he received, and one characteristic of this sort of communication is its loose, unstructured, garrulous or unedited quality.

Compare this message input with the kind of coded messages received by the ordinary citizen of the present-day industrial society. In addition to all of the above, he also receives messages – mainly from the mass media – that have been artfully fashioned by communications experts. He listens to the news; he watches carefully scripted plays, telecasts, movies; he hears much more music (a highly disciplined form of communication); he hears frequent speeches. Above all, he does something his peasant ancestor could not do: He reads – thousands of words every day, all of them carefully edited in advance.

The industrial revolution, bringing with it the enormous elaboration of the mass media, thus alters radically the nature of the messages received by the ordinary individual. In addition to receiving uncoded messages from the environment, and coded but casual messages from the people around him, the individual now begins to receive a growing number of coded but pre-engineered messages as well.

These engineered messages differ from the casual or do-it-yourself product in one crucial respect: Instead of being loose or carelessly framed, the engineered product tends to be tighter, more condensed, less redundant. It is highly purposive, preprocessed to eliminate unnecessary repetition, consciously designed to maximize informational content. It is, as communications theorists say, "information-rich."

This highly significant but often overlooked fact can be observed by anyone who takes the trouble to compare a tape recorded sample of 500 words of ordinary household conversation (i.e., coded, but casual) with 500 words of newspaper text or movie dialogue (also coded, but engineered). Casual conversation tends to be filled with repetition and pauses. Ideas are repeated several times, often in identical words, but if not, then varied only slightly.

In contrast, the 500 words of newspaper copy or movie dialogue are carefully preedited, streamlined. They convey relatively non-repetitive ideas. They tend to be more grammatically accurate than ordinary conversation and, if presented orally, they tend to be enunciated more clearly. Waste material has been trimmed away. Editor, writer, director – everyone involved in the production of the engineered message – fights to "keep the story moving" or to produce "fast-paced action." It is no accident that books, movies, television plays, are so frequently advertised as "high-speed adventure," "fast-reading," or "breathless." No publisher or movie producer would dare advertise his work as "repetitive" or "redundant."

Thus, as radio, television, newspapers, magazines and novels sweep through society, as the proportion of engineered messages received by the individual rises (and the proportion of uncoded and coded casual messages correspondingly declines), we witness a profound change: a steady speed-up in the average pace at which image-producing messages are presented to the individual. The sea of coded information that surrounds him begins to beat at his senses with new urgency.

This helps account for the sense of hurry in everyday affairs. But if industrialism is marked by a communication's speed-up, the transition to super-industrialism is marked by intense efforts to accelerate the process even further. The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system.

In the United States today the median time spent by adults reading newspapers is fifty-two minutes per day. The same person who commits nearly an hour to newspapers also spends time reading magazines, books, signs, billboards, recipes, instructions, labels on cans, advertising on the back of breakfast food boxes, etc. Surrounded by print, he "ingests" between 10,000 and 20,000 edited words per day of the several times that many to which he is exposed. The same person also probably spends an hour and a quarter per day listening to the radio – more if he owns an FM receiver. If he listens to news, commercials, commentary or other such programs, he will, during this period, hear about 11,000 pre-processed words. He also spends several hours watching television – add another 10,000 words or so, plus a sequence of carefully arranged, highly purposive visuals. (This is not to suggest that only words and pictures convey or evoke images. Music, too, sets the internal image machinery working, although the images produced may be completely non-verbal.)

Nothing, indeed, is quite so purposive as advertising, and today the average American adult is assaulted by a minimum of 560 advertising messages each day. Of the 560 to which he is exposed, however, he only notices seventy-six. In effect, he blocks out 484 advertising messages a day to preserve his attention for other matters.

All this represents the press of engineered messages against his senses. And the pressure is rising. In an effort to transmit even richer image-producing messages at an even faster rate, communications people, artists and others consciously work to make each instant of exposure to the mass media carry a heavier informational and emotional freight.

Thus we see the widespread and increasing use of symbolism for compacting information. Today advertising men, in a deliberate attempt to cram more messages into the individual's mind within a given moment of time, make increasing use of the symbolic techniques of the arts. Consider the "tiger" that is allegedly put in one's tank. Here a single word transmits to the audience a distinct visual image that has been associated since childhood with power, speed, and force. The pages of advertising trade magazines like Printer's Ink are filled with sophisticated technical articles about the use of verbal and visual symbolism to accelerate image-flow. Indeed, today many artists might learn new imageaccelerating techniques from the advertising men.

If the ad men, who must pay for each split second of time on radio or television, and who fight for the reader's fleeting attention in magazines and newspapers, are busy trying to communicate maximum imagery in minimum time, there is evidence, too, that at least some members of the public want to increase the rate at which they can receive messages and process images. This explains the phenomenal success of speed-reading courses among college students, business executives, politicians and others. One leading speed-reading school claims it can increase almost anyone's input speed three times, and some readers report the ability to read literally tens of thousands of words per minute – a claim roundly disputed by many reading experts. Whether or not such speeds are possible, the clear fact is that the rate of communication is accelerating. Busy people wage a desperate battle each day to plow through as much information as possible. Speed-reading presumably helps them do this.

The impulse toward acceleration in communications is, however, by no means limited to advertising or to the printed word. A desire to maximize message content in minimum time explains, for example, the experiments conducted by psychologists at the American Institutes for Research who played taped lectures at faster than normal speeds and then tested the comprehension of listeners. Their purpose: to discover whether students would learn more if lecturers talked faster.

The same intent to accelerate information flow explains the recent obsession with splitscreen and multiscreen movies. At the Montreal World's Fair, viewers in pavilion after pavilion were confronted not with a traditional movie screen on which ordered visual images appear in sequence, but with two, three, or five screens, each of them hurling messages at the viewer at the same time. On these, several stories play themselves out at the same time, demanding of the viewer the ability to accept many more messages simultaneously than any movie-goer in the past, or else to censor out, or block, certain messages to keep the rate of message-input, or image-stimulation, within reasonable limits.

The author of an article in Life, entitled "A Film Revolution to Blitz Man's Mind," accurately describes the experience in these words: "Having to look at six images at the same time, having to watch in twenty minutes the equivalent of a full length movie, excites and crams the mind." Elsewhere he suggests that another multi-screen film "by putting more into a moment, condenses time."

Even in music the same accelerative thrust is increasingly evident. A conference of composers and computer specialists held in San Francisco not long ago was informed that for several centuries music has been undergoing "an increase in the amount of auditory information transmitted during a given interval of time," and there is evidence also that musicians today play the music of Mozart, Bach and Haydn at a faster tempo than that at which the same music was performed at the time it was composed. We are getting Mozart on the run.

If our images of reality are changing more rapidly, and the machinery of image-transmission is being speeded up, a parallel change is altering the very codes we use. For language, too, is convulsing. According to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, senior editor of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, "The words we use are changing faster today – and not merely on the slang level, but on every level. The rapidity with which words come and go is vastly accelerated. This seems to be true not only of English, but of French, Russian and Japanese as well."

Flexner illustrated this with the arresting suggestion that, of the estimated 450,000 "usable" words in the English language today, only perhaps 250,000 would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare. Were Shakespeare suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on the average, only five out of every nine words in our vocabulary. The Bard would be a semi-literate.

This implies that if the language had the same number of words in Shakespeare's time as it does today, at least 200,000 words – perhaps several times that many – have dropped out and been replaced in the intervening four centuries. Moreover, Flexner conjectures that a full third of this turnover has occurred within the last fifty years alone. This, if correct, would mean that words are now dropping out of the language and being replaced at a rate at least three times faster than during the base period 1564 to 1914.

This high turnover rate reflects changes in things, processes, and qualities in the environment. Some new words come directly from the world of consumer products and technology. Thus, for example, words like "fast-back," "wash-and-wear" or flashcube" were all propelled into the language by advertising in recent years. Other words come from the headlines. "Sit-in" and "swim-in" are recent products of the civil rights movement; "teach-in" a product of the campaign against the Vietnam war; "be-in" and "love-in" products of the hippie subculture. The LSD cult has brought with it a profusion of new words – "acid-head," "psychedelic," etc.

At the level of slang, the turnover rate is so rapid that it has forced dictionary makers to change their criteria for word inclusion. "In 1954," says Flexner, "when I started work on the Dictionary of American Slang, I would not consider a word for inclusion unless I could find three uses of the word over a five-year period. Today such a criterion would be impossible. Language, like art, is increasingly becoming a fad proposition. The slang terms 'fab' and 'gear,' for example, didn't last a single year. They entered the teen-age vocabulary in about 1966; by 1967 they were out. You cannot use a time criterion for slang any more.

One fact contributing to the rapid introduction and obsolescence of words is the incredible speed with which a new word can be injected into wide usage. In the late 1950's and early sixties one could actually trace the way in which certain scholarly jargon words such as "rubric" or "subsumed" were picked up from academic journals, used in smallcirculation periodicals like the New York Review of Books or Commentary, then adopted by Esquire with its then circulation of 800,000 to 1,000,000, and finally diffused through the larger society by Time, Newsweek and the larger mass magazines. Today the process has been telescoped. The editors of mass magazines no longer pick up vocabulary from the intermediate intellectual publications alone; they, too, lift directly from the scholarly press in their hurry to be "on top of things."

When Susan Sontag disinterred the word "camp" and used it as the basis of an essay in Partisan Review

in the fall of 1964, Time waited only a few weeks before devoting an article to the word and its rejuvenator. Within a matter of a few additional weeks, the term was cropping up in newspapers and other mass media. Today the word has virtually dropped out of usage. "Teenybopper" is another word that came and went with blinding speed.

A more significant example of language turnover can be seen in the sudden shift of meaning associated with the ethnic term "black." For years, dark-skinned Americans regarded the term as racist. Liberal whites dutifully taught their children to use the term "Negro" and to capitalize the "N." Shortly after Stokely Carmichael proclaimed the doctrine of Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966, however, "black" became a term of pride among both blacks and whites in the movement for racial justice. Caught off guard, liberal whites went through a period of confusion, uncertain as to whether to use Negro or black. Black was quickly legitimated when the mass media adopted the new meaning. Within a few months, black was "in," Negro "out."

Even faster cases of diffusion are on record. "The Beatles," says lexicographer Flexner, "at the height of their fame could make up any word they like, slip it into a record, and within a month it would be part of the language. At one time perhaps no more than fifty people in NASA used the word 'A-OK.' But when an astronaut used it during a televised flight, the word became part of the language in a single day. The same has been true of other space terms, too – lik 'sputnik' or 'all systems go.'"

As new words sweep in, old words vanish. A picture of a nude girl nowadays is no longer a "pin-up" or a "cheesecake shot," but a "playmate." "Hep" has given way to "hip"; "hipster" to "hippie." "Go-go" rushed eagerly into the language at breakneck speed, but it is already gone-gone among those who are truly "with it."

The turnover of language would even appear to involve non-verbal forms of communication as well. We have slang gestures, just as we have slang words – thumbs up or down, thumb to nose, the "shame on you" gesture used by children, the hand moving across the neck to suggest a throat-slitting. Professionals who watch the development of the gestural language suggest that it, too, may be changing more rapidly.

Some gestures that were regarded as semi-obscene have become somewhat more acceptable as sexual values have changed in the society. Others that were used only by a few have achieved wider usage. An example of diffusion, Flexner observes, is the wider use today of that gesture of contempt and defiance – the fist raised and screwed about. The invasion of Italian movies that hit the United States in the fifties and sixties probably contributed to this. Similarly, the upraised finger – the "up yours" gesture – appears to be gaining greater respectability and currency than it once had. At the same time, other gestures have virtually vanished or been endowed with radically changed meaning. The circle formed by the thumb and forefinger to suggest that all goes well appears to be fading out; Churchill's "V for Victory" sign is now used by protesters to signify something emphatically different: "peace" not "victory."

There was a time when a man learned the language of his society and made use of it, with little change, throughout his lifetime. His "relationship" with each learned word or gesture was durable. Today, to an astonishing degree, it is not.

Art, like gesture, is a form of non-verbal expression and a prime channel for the transmission of images. Here the evidences of ephemeralization are, if anything, even more pronounced. If we regard each school of art as though it were a word-based language, we are witnessing the successive replacement not of words, but of whole languages at once. In the past one rarely saw a fundamental change in an art style within a man's lifetime. A style or school endured, as a rule, for generations at a time. Today the pace of turnover in art is vision-blurring – the viewer scarcely has time to "see" a school develop, to learn its language, so to speak, before it vanishes.

Bursting on the scene in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Impressionism was only the first of a sequence of shattering changes. It came at a time when industrialism was beginning its climactic forward surge, bringing with it a notable step-up in the tempo of everyday life. "It is above all the furious speed of [technological] development and the way the pace is forced that seems pathological, particularly when compared with the rate of progress in earlier periods in the history of art and culture," writes the art historian Arnold Hauser in describing the turnover of art styles. "For the rapid development of technology not only accelerates the change of fashion, but also the shifting emphases in the criteria of aesthetic taste. ... The continual and increasingly rapid replacement of old articles in everyday use by new ones ... readjusts the speed at which philosophical and artistic revaluations occur ..."

If we roughly date the Impressionist interval from 1875 to 1910, we see a period of dominance lasting approximately thirty-five years. Since then no school or style, from Futurism to Fauvism, from Cubism to Surrealism, has dominated the scene for even that long. One after another, styles supplant one another. The most enduring twentieth-century school, Abstract Expressionism, held sway for at most twenty years, from 1940 to 1960, then to be followed by a wild succession – "Pop" lasting perhaps five years, "Op" managing to grip the public's attention for two or three years, then the emergence, appropriately enough, of "Kinetic Art" whose very raison d'être is transience.

This phantasmagoric turnover is evident not merely in New York or San Francisco, but in Paris, in Rome, in Stockholm and London – wherever painters are found. Thus Robert Hughes writes in the New Society: "Hailing the new painters is now one of the annual sports in England ... The enthusiasm for discovering a new direction in English art once a year has become a mania – an euphoric, almost hysterical belief in renewal." Indeed, he suggests, the expectation that each year will bring a new mode and a new crop of artists is "a significant parody of what is, in itself, a parodical situation – the accelerated turnover in the avant-garde today."

If schools of art may be likened to languages, then individual works of art may be compared to words. If we make this transposition, we find in art a process exactly analogous to that now occurring in the verbal language. Here, too, "words" – i.e., individual works of art – are coming into use and then dropping out of the vocabulary at heightened speeds. Individual works flash across our consciousness in galleries or in the pages of mass magazines; the next time we look they are gone. Sometimes the work itself quite literally disappears – many are collages or constructions built of fragile materials that simply fall apart after a short time.

Much of the confusion in the art world today arises from the failure of the cultural establishment to recognize, once and for all, that elitism and permanence are dead – so, at least, contends John McHale, the imaginative Scot, half artist/half social scientist, who heads the Center for Integrative Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton. In a forceful essay entitled The Plastic Parthenon, McHale points out that "traditional canons of literary and artistic judgment ... tend to place high value on permanence, uniqueness and the enduring universal value of chosen artifacts." Such aesthetic standards, he argues, were appropriate enough in a world of handcrafted goods and relatively small taste-making elites. These same standards, however, "in no way enable one to relate adequately to our present situation in which astronomical numbers of artifacts are mass produced, circulated and consumed. These may be identical, or only marginally different. In varying degree, they are expendable, replaceable, and lack any unique 'value' or intrinsic 'truth.'"

Today's artists, McHale suggests, neither work for a tiny elite nor take seriously the idea that permanence is a virtue. The future of art, he says, "seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks." Rather, artists work for the short term. McHale concludes that: "Accelerated changes in the human condition require an array of symbolic images of man which will match up to the requirements of constant change, fleeting impression and a high rate of obsolescence." We need, he says, "a replaceable, expendable series of ikons."

One may quarrel with McHale's contention that transience in art is desirable. Perhaps the flight from permanence is a tactical error. It can even be argued that our artists are employing homeopathic magic, behaving like primitives who, awed by a force they do not comprehend, attempt to exert control over it by simple-mindedly imitating it. But whatever one's attitude toward contemporary art, transience remains an implacable fact, a social and historic tendency so central to our times that it cannot be ignored. And it is clear that artists are reacting to it.

The impulse toward transience in art explains the whole development of that most transient of art works, the "happening." Allan Kaprow, who is often credited with originating the happening, has explicitly suggested its relationship to the throw-away culture within which we live. The happening, according to its proponents, is ideally performed once and once only. The happening is the Kleenex tissue of art.

This so, kinetic art can be considered the aesthetic embodiment of modularism. Kinetic sculptures or constructions crawl, whistle, whine, swing, twitch, rock or pulsate, their lights blinking, their magnetic tapes whirling, their plastic, steel, glass and copper components arranging and rearranging themselves into evanescent patterns within a given, though sometimes concealed, framework. Here the wiring and connections tend to be the least transient part of the structure, just as the gantry cranes and service towers in Joan Littlewood's Fun Palace are designed to outlive any particular arrangement of the modular components. The intent of the kinetic work, however, is to create maximum variability and maximum transience. Jean Clay has pointed out that in a traditional work of art "the relationship of parts to a whole had been decided forever." In kinetic art, he says, the "balance of forms is in flux."

Many artists are working with engineers and scientists today, in the hope of exploiting the latest technical processes for their own purpose, the symbolization of the accelerative thrust in society. "Speed," writes Francastel, the French art critic, "has become something undreamt-of, and constant movement every man's intimate experience." Art reflects this new reality.

Thus we find artists from France, England, the United States, Scotland, Sweden, Israel and elsewhere creating kinetic images. Their creed is perhaps best expressed by Yaacov Agam, an Israeli kineticist, who says: "We are different from what we were three moments ago, and in three minutes more, we will again be different ... I try to give this approach a plastic expression by creating a visual form that doesn't exist. The image appears and disappears, but nothing is retained."

The final culmination of such efforts, of course, is the creation of those new and quite real "fun palaces" – so-called total environment nightclubs in which the fun-seeker plunges into a space in which lights, colors and sounds change their patterns constantly. In effect, the patron steps inside a work of kinetic art. Here again the framework, the building itself, is only the longest lasting part of the whole, while its interior is designed to produce transient combinations of sensory in-puts. Whether one regards this as fun or not depends on the individual, perhaps; but the overall direction of such movements is clear. In art, as in language, we are racing toward impermanence. Man's relationships with symbolic imagery are growing more and more temporary.

Events speed past us, compelling us to reassess our assumptions – our previous formed images of reality. Research topples older conceptions of man and nature. Ideas come and go at a frenetic rate. (A rate, that, in science at least, has been estimated to be twenty to one hundred times faster than a mere century ago.) Image-laden messages hammer at our senses. Meanwhile, language and art, the codes through which we transfer image-bearing messages to one another, are themselves turning over more rapidly.

All this cannot – and does not – leave us unchanged. It accelerates the rate at which the individual must process his imagery if he is to adapt successfully to the churning environment. Nobody really knows how we convert signals from outside into images within. Yet psychology and the information sciences cast some light on what happens once the image is born. They suggest, to begin with, that the mental model is organized into many highly complex image-structures, and that new images are, in effect, filed away in these structures according to several classificatory principles. A newly generated image is filed away with other images pertaining to the same subject matter. Smaller and more limited inferences are ranged under larger and more inclusive generalizations. The image is checked out for its consistency with those already in file. (There is evidence of the existence of a specific neural mechanism that carries out this consistency-checking procedure.) We make a decision, with respect to the image, as to whether it is closely relevant to our goals, or whether, instead, it is remote and hence, for us, unimportant. Each image is also evaluated – is it "good" or "bad" for us? Finally, whatever else we do with the new image, we also judge its truth. We decide just how much faith to place in it. Is it an accurate reflection of reality? Can it be believed? Can we base action on it?

A new image that clearly fits somewhere into a subject matter slot, and which is consistent with images already stored there, gives us little difficulty. But if, as happens increasingly, the image is ambiguous, if it is inconsistent, or, worse yet, if it flies in the face of our previous inferences, the mental model has to be forcibly revised. Large numbers of images may have to be reclassified, shuffled, changed again until a suitable integration is found. Sometimes whole groups of image-structures have to be torn down and rebuilt. In extreme cases, the basic shape of the whole model has to be drastically overhauled.

Thus the mental model must be seen not as a static library of images, but as a living entity, tightly charged with energy and activity. It is not a "given" that we passively receive from outside. Rather, it is something we actively construct and reconstruct from moment to moment. Restlessly scanning the outer world with our senses, probing for information relevant to our needs and desires, we engage in a constant process of rearrangement and updating.

At any given instant, innumerable images are decaying, dropping into the black immensity of the forgotten. Others are entering the system, being processed and filed. At the same time, we are retrieving images, "using them," and returning them to file, perhaps in a different place. We are constantly comparing images, associating them, cross-referencing them in new ways, and repositioning them. This is what is meant by the term "mental activity." And like muscular activity, it is a form of work. It requires high energy to keep the system operating.

Change, roaring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to reflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increasingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, withdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis – or even death.

To maintain our adaptive balance, to keep the gap within manageable proportions, we struggle to refresh our imagery, to keep it up-to-date, to relearn reality. Thus the accelerative thrust outside us finds a corresponding speed-up in the adapting individual. Our imageprocessing mechanisms, whatever they may be, are driven to operate at higher and higher speeds.

This has consequences that have been as yet largely overlooked. For when we classify an image, any image, we make a definite, perhaps even measurable, energy-investment in a specific organizational pattern in the brain. Learning requires energy; and relearning requires even more. "All the researches on learning," writes Harold D. Lasswell of Yale, "seem to confirm the view that 'energies' are bound in support of past learning, and that new energies are essential to unbind the old ..." At the neurological level, he continues, "Any established system appears to include exceedingly intricate arrangements of cell material, electrical charges and chemical elements. At any cross section in time ... the somatic structure represents a tremendous investment of fixed forms and potentials ..." What this means in brief is very simple: there are costs involved in relearning – or, in our terminology, reclassifying imagery.

In all the talk about the need for continuing education, in all the popular discussions of retraining, there is an assumption that man's potentials for re-education are unlimited. This is, at best, an assumption, not a fact, and it is an assumption that needs close and scientific scrutiny. The process of image formation and classification is, in the end, a physical process, dependent upon finite characteristics of nerve cells and body chemicals. In the neural system as now constituted there are, in all likelihood, inherent limits to the amount and speed of image processing that the individual can accomplish. How fast and how continuously can the individual revise his inner images before he smashes up against these limits?

Nobody knows. It may well be that the limits stretch so far beyond present needs, that such gloomy speculations are unjustified. Yet one salient fact commands attention: by speeding up change in the outer world, we compel the individual to relearn his environment at every moment. This, in itself, places a new demand on the nervous system. The people of the past, adapting to comparatively stable environments, maintained longer-lasting ties with their own inner conceptions of "the-way-things-are." We, moving into high-transience society, are forced to truncate these relationships. Just as we must make and break our relationships with things, places, people and organizations at an ever more rapid pace, so, too, must we turn over our conceptions of reality, our mental images of the world at shorter and shorter intervals.

Transience, then, the forcible abbreviation of man's relationships, is not merely a condition of the external world. It has its shadow within us as well. New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external world erupt into our lives in the form of increased turnover rates – shorter and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life. They demand a new level of adaptability. And they set the stage for that potentially devastating social illness – future shock.