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Meetings - also disagreements - of Toffler with the Media Ecology
Abstract
We start by affirming the complexity of communication and refer some of the main contributions to communication that have come from other fields of knowledge. We next point out that Alvin Toffler, a prominent American futurist who died on June 27, 2016, is one of the intellectuals who made valuable contributions to the communication sciences. At the end of the decade of 1970, for example, he anticipated the phenomenon of the prosumtion and gave name to the figure of the prosumers. Not a few academics and researchers in communication - and of the social sciences, in general - have recognized the effective relevance of the prosumers in the development of digital communications. In the work and thinking of Alvin Toffler, we identified some concerns in common with Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) and the Media Ecology developed by Neil Postman. In this text, we will focus our attention on three of Alvin Toffler's main books, in which he discusses topics related to the development of communication: The 'future shock' (1970), The Third Wave (1980), Revolutionary Wealth (2006), in which Heidi, his wife, participated as coauthor.
Keywords
Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, Media Ecology.
Contents
1.Starting point: the complexity of the communication sciences. 2. The 'shock of the future". 3. The Third Wave. 4. The revolutionary wealth. 5. Conclusions. 6. Notes. 7. References.
1. Starting point: the complexity of the communication sciences
Communication is 'complex', and as Edgar Morin (2011) rightly points out, complexity is a problem word and not a solution word. Rafael Alberto Pérez (2012), "father of the new strategic theory", emphasizes that not a few of the main contributions to communication have proceeded - and we will continue to proceed, we affirm - from other fields of knowledge:
"the scientist who best explained the intimate connection between communication and human thought was a psychologist: Vygotsky. The one who finished locating it between the body and the mind was a neurophysiologist, the Portuguese Damasio, in his Error of Descartes. The one who gave us his first formulation/scientific definition, a mathematician: Shannon. The one who best connected communication and cultural heritage, an engineer: Shannon, who best connected communication and cultural heritage, an engineer: Korzybsky, the...