Word: gingrichs
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This may sound visionary, but it's nothing compared with the vision sketched by Gingrich's favorite futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in their book Creating a New Civilization. The Tofflers view the old-fashioned, physical Congress as suffering from a progressive erosion of relevance that calls for a wholesale rethinking of the Constitution. "Today's spectacular advances in communications technology open, for the first time, a mind-boggling array of possibilities for direct citizen participation in political decision-making." And since our "pseudo-representatives" are so "unresponsive," we the people must begin to "shift from depending on representatives...
Given that accurate information, rationally processed, often leads people to undermine the public good, how excited should we be about Gingrich's Thomas, the online data base of congressional documents? Granted, there may not be a lobbyist manipulating the data flow. But that does not mean interest-group politics won't result. In cyberspace, technology may have finally reached a point where groups form spontaneously; on the Internet, passing information to a neighbor of like interest is a push-button exercise and can easily trigger a chain reaction. The result is a mass mailing that requires neither a centralized mass...
...worry. In the Gingrich camp, optimism runs rampant. Alvin Toffler and a few other seers prepared a "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" for the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which supports Gingrich. The authors dismiss in Tofflerian language those who fret about social balkanization in cyberspace as "Second Wave ideologues" (that is, Industrial Revolution dinosaurs, not clued in to the "Third Wave," the knowledge revolution). "Rather than being a centrifugal force helping to tear society apart, cyberspace can be one of the main forms of glue holding together an increasingly free and diverse society." The key to a "secure...
WHAT HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH THINKS ABOUT the brave new world of technological change can largely be traced back to the works of two best- selling authors: Alvin Toffler, 66, and George Gilder, 55. When Gingrich tosses out such concepts as "the Third Wave" or the "overthrow of matter," when he talks about the "demassification" of U.S. society and the "bottom- up" freedoms created by the personal computer, he is quoting chapter and verse from the ideas of Toffler and Gilder...
...Gingrich's personal association with Toffler dates from the early 1970s, when he, then an assistant history professor at West Georgia College, went to Chicago to attend a seminar the author was giving. The young academic introduced himself to the best-selling Toffler; this acquaintance blossomed into a friendship after Gingrich was elected to Congress. Through the years the Gingriches began spending considerable time with Toffler and his wife of 44 years, Heidi, who has collaborated on her husband's books without, until recently, accepting byline credit. Over the recent New Year's holidays, the Congressman and his wife Marianne...