Too Many Choices
By Bruce Shawkey
The central argument of this chapter that technology will destroy individual freedom.
Toffler argues that industrial society has indeed produced enormous amounts of standardization—mass-produced cars, standardized schools, mass media, uniform products and similar lifestyles. But he says that advanced technology is beginning to reverse that process.
Instead of giving people fewer choices, the future will give them so many choices that choosing itself may become a problem.
1. The old fear: technology will make everyone alike
Toffler begins by challenging a common prediction of his time: that technology would turn people into standardized, passive consumers.
Writers such as Jacques Ellul argued that industrial society was eliminating genuine human choice. As technology advanced, they believed, people would increasingly become controlled by machines, corporations and bureaucratic systems.
Toffler says this argument makes a crucial mistake: It assumes that more advanced technology necessarily produces more standardization.
He argues that this was true of early industrial technology, but not necessarily of the technology that is coming next. Mass production created standardization—but automation can create variety. The industrial revolution made it economical to manufacture millions of identical products.
That is why, Toffler points to things such as: identical-looking gas stations, standardized hotels, mass-produced automobiles; similar grocery stores; and standardized consumer products
But increasingly sophisticated machinery changes the economics.
With automated and computerized production, manufacturers can economically produce short runs of specialized products rather than millions of identical ones.
Instead of:
1 product × 1,000,000 copies
technology makes possible:
1,000 different products × 1,000 copies each.
Toffler sees this as a fundamental technological transformation.
3. The automobile is his favorite example
The automobile industry illustrates the transition particularly well.
The American buyer once had relatively few choices. But foreign competition and changing manufacturing technology produced an explosion of models, engines, colors, transmissions and accessories.
The Ford Mustang is Toffler's example.
Instead of simply buying "a Mustang," the customer could essentially design a personalized Mustang by combining different options.
The important point isn't the Mustang itself. It's what the Mustang represents:
Technology is making mass customization possible.
Eventually, Toffler predicts, it could become almost as cheap to manufacture a million different objects as a million identical objects.
4. And that's where the problem begins: “overchoice”
This is the key concept of the chapter.
More choices sound like more freedom. But there is a point at which too many choices become burdensome.
Think about buying a car.
You don't merely choose:
Ford or Chevrolet?
You may have to choose among:
make
model
engine
transmission
body style
color
upholstery
tires
accessories
stereo
options
Every additional choice creates more decisions and sub-decisions.
Eventually, the consumer can spend enormous amounts of time gathering information simply to make a choice.
Toffler calls this overchoice.
His basic formula is:
More technology → more variety → more choices → greater complexity → eventually, overchoice.
And this is where freedom can paradoxically begin to feel like its opposite.
5. The trend isn't limited to consumer products
Toffler then makes a much broader argument.
He says the same process is occurring in culture, education and communications.
Society isn't simply producing more varieties of cars and detergents. It is producing more varieties of:
books
magazines
movies
music
art
education
lifestyles
political and cultural expression
In other words, society itself is becoming fragmented into smaller and smaller groups.
6. Books and art are becoming more diverse
Toffler cites studies showing that the number of different books being published per million people was increasing in many countries.
He interprets this as evidence that people are developing increasingly specialized interests.
The same thing is happening in art.
Instead of one dominant artistic style, society contains many simultaneously:
surrealism
abstract expressionism
pop art
kinetic art
hard-edge painting
representational art
and many others
There is no longer one artistic style that everyone is expected to follow.
Toffler calls this cultural fragmentation or destandardization.
7. Education is being pulled in the same direction
One of the most interesting parts of the chapter concerns education. Toffler sees traditional schools as products of the industrial age.
Industrial society needed large numbers of people trained in roughly standardized ways, so schools developed: standardized curricula, grades, schedules, classrooms, degrees, majors, standardized testing, and centralized administration
But students increasingly want something different. Toffler compares the student to the Mustang buyer. The Mustang buyer says: “I want to design my own car.” The student says: “I want to design my own education.”
He predicts that technology will eventually make individualized education much easier.
Computers could allow students to learn at their own pace, choose different subjects, follow individualized programs, study from home, access enormous databases, and receive instruction electronically
In Toffler's vision, the traditional classroom would gradually give way to something much more personalized. This prediction is particularly striking today because he was writing decades before widespread personal computers, the internet, online education and smartphones.
8. Mass media will become “de-massified” Toffler then attacks another popular assumption: that television and mass media will make everybody think and behave alike.
He acknowledges that television can have a homogenizing effect because producing television programs is expensive and therefore broadcasters need huge audiences. But he sees other technologies moving in the opposite direction.
Movies, magazines, radio and publishing are increasingly being divided into specialized markets. Instead of one movie for everybody, there are movies for particular audiences.
Instead of one magazine for everyone, there are magazines for: sports enthusiasts, teenagers, professionals, hobbyists, regional communities, political groups, and specialized interest. Technology makes these small audiences economically viable.
9. Technology is actually breaking up the mass audience. This is one of Toffler's most important ideas.
The old industrial model was: One product → enormous mass audience.
The emerging model is: Many specialized products → many specialized audiences.
He calls this de-massification. Cheap printing technology, copying machines, videotape and other emerging technologies were allowing ordinary people to become publishers, filmmakers and broadcasters. His point is that the communications monopoly is being broken apart.
Instead of a few organizations speaking to millions of people, eventually millions of people will be able to communicate with relatively small audiences.
10. His vision of personalized media was remarkably futuristic. Toward the end of the chapter, Toffler describes something that sounds surprisingly like today's personalized internet. He imagines a computer storing information about an individual's interests.
The system would then search newspapers, magazines, films and other sources and deliver material specifically suited to that person. In effect, everyone could receive a different newspaper.
No two people would necessarily receive the same information. Remember, Toffler was writing this in the late 1960s.
His terminology is dated, but the underlying idea sounds remarkably familiar: personalized information feeds based on individual interests.
11. But Toffler's real warning comes at the end. After spending most of the chapter arguing that technology will increase diversity, Toffler introduces the problem that gives the chapter its title.
More choice is not automatically better.
At some point: Choice → too much choice → confusion → anxiety → difficulty deciding.
That's overchoice.
The paradox is that technology can simultaneously make us more free and less comfortable with our freedom.
We may have thousands of possibilities but lack the time, information or mental energy to evaluate them. Toffler therefore distinguishes between: Freedom of choice and the ability to cope with choice. Those are not the same thing.
The chapter in one sentence
Toffler argues that the future won't necessarily enslave us by giving us too few choices; instead, advanced technology will produce such an explosion of choices, products, lifestyles, information and cultural alternatives that we may become overwhelmed by our own freedom.
The big idea
The chapter turns the conventional fear of technology upside down:
Industrial technology created standardization.
Super-industrial technology creates diversity. And too much diversity creates overchoice.
That's the foundation for what follows in Future Shock: Toffler's concern isn't simply that people will lose their freedom, but that the sheer speed and volume of change will make it increasingly difficult for people to make meaningful choices and cope with the world they have created.
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