Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

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.

The immobile and the moible nations