The Future Shock documentary was based on the best selling book by Alvin Toffler, and reflects the global ecological and technological concerns of society at the time.
THE GOOD: Awesome moody Moog-synth keyboard sounds, suggesting Future Shock was a stylistic forerunner of 'Blade Runner's' futuristic aesthetic. The doco also highlights many changing technologies that have indeed impacted on our civilisation. For example cloning, which was a completely implausible technology at the time, was discussed as a realistic possibility.
THE BAD: The style is at times stodgy and Wells puts on his very best harbinger-of-doom narration voice, whilst constantly bemoaning that 'Nothing is permanent any more' as though before that nothing had ever died or disintegrated in the whole history of the universe. Even heart transplants and artificial limbs are portrayed as examples of 'constant change, leading to Futureshock'. The double-sided nature of technology is not often discussed - most technology is seen as unequivocally bad.
Overall this program raises some good points that are still relevant today. It would have benefited from a deeper analysis of the ways technology would shape and even enhance our lives, rather than the overly-simplistic 'technology is change, and change is bad'. Clearly, not all change is bad, as in the case of desegregation and equal rights for women. But then, as a child of Future Shock, I don't know any different anyway!
