Seeking experiences to write about, Alvin and Heidi Toffler spent the next five years as
blue collar workers on
assembly lines while studying industrial
mass production in their daily work. In their first factory jobs, Heidi became a
union shop steward in the aluminum foundry where she worked. Alvin became a millwright and welder. In the evenings Alvin would write poetry and fiction, but discovered he was proficient at neither. They returned to New York City in 1959 when
Fortune magazine invited Alvin to become its labor columnist, later having him write about business and management. Toffler was hired by
IBM to conduct research and write a paper on the social and organizational impact of computers, leading to his contact with the earliest computer "gurus" and artificial intelligence researchers and proponents.
Xerox invited him to write about its research laboratory and
AT&T consulted him for strategic advice. This AT&T work led to a study of telecommunications, which advised the company's top management to break up the company more than a decade before the government forced AT&T to break up. In the mid-1960s, the Tofflers began five years of research on what would become
Future Shock, published in 1970. The book has never been out of print and has been translated into dozens of languages. He claimed that one of the side effects of the digital age has been "information overload". Yet another term he coined is "
prosumer", which describes a person who is simultaneously a producer and consumer. In 1990, he wrote
Powershift, also with the help of his wife, Heidi. His opinions about the future of education, many of which were in
Future Shock, have often been quoted. An often misattributed quote, however, is that of psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy: "Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn." Early in his career, after traveling to other countries, he became aware of the new and myriad inputs that visitors received from these other cultures. He explained during an interview that some visitors would become "truly disoriented and upset" by the strange environment, which he described as a reaction to
culture shock. From that issue, he foresaw another problem for the future, when a culturally "new environment comes to you ... and comes to you rapidly." That kind of sudden cultural change within one's own country, which he felt many would not understand, would lead to a similar reaction, one of "future shock", which he wrote about in his book by that title. He describes the "First Wave" as the society after
agrarian revolution and replaced the first
hunter-gatherer cultures. The "Second Wave," he labels society during the
Industrial Revolution (ca. late 17th century through the mid-20th century). That period saw the increase of urban industrial populations which had undermined the traditional
nuclear family, and initiated a factory-like education system, and the growth of the corporation. Toffler said: The "Third Wave" was a term he coined to describe the
post-industrial society, which began in the late 1950s. His description of this period dovetails with other futurist writers, who also wrote about the
Information Age,
Space Age,
Electronic Era,
Global Village, terms which highlighted a scientific-technological revolution. The Tofflers claimed to have predicted a number of geopolitical events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the future economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region. ==Influences and popular culture==