John Naisbitt, who spent two years on the New York Times Bestseller list in the early 1980s with Megatrends, proved a pretty good prognosticator, not just a useful counterpoint to the previous decade’s dire soothsaying of Alvin Toffler. They were both right on many counts, often seeing flip sides of the same coin. His comments about technology not reordering socializing along more-virtual lines seem off the mark, however. Three quick excerpts follow from a 1982 People Q&A conducted by John Stickney.

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Question:

Are we more obsessed with the future than past generations?

John Naisbitt:

Yes, because of an important shift in our time orientation. As an agricultural society, we were oriented to the past, with traditions of how to plant and harvest. An industrial society is oriented to the present—get it out, get it done, ad hoc, bottom line, short term. Now we’re changing from an industrial society to one based on information, and that’s a megatrend. An information society is oriented to the future, which is why we’re so interested in it. We’re drowning in data, yet thirsty for intelligence and knowledge.

Question:

With this deluge of data, don’t a lot of people feel they may go under?

John Naisbitt:

Of course. People are looking for something to hold onto, and that’s why we’re having a religious revival. That’s also why we have all these waves of nostalgia. We want to cling to the past, which is becoming ever more recent, by the way. The past is the 1950s and 1960s.

Question:

How can you get a fix on the future?

John Naisbitt:

A sense of what’s happening now would put us way ahead. Practically the whole country continues to act as if we’re an industrial society. You shouldn’t get depressed about the latest gloomy business statistics, which are often rooted in old indices like the Dow Jones industrial average. Many companies in electronics, biotechnology and other so-called “sunrise sectors” are going strong. They’re the ones to invest in now. The economy is much better off than the economists represent to us.

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Question:

Why are there so many start-ups now?

John Naisbitt:

Because access to the system is so much easier. In the old economy the strategic resource was capital. Now it’s what’s in your head, it’s information, not how much money you’ve got in your pocket. Think about all those kids starting software companies. One-third of the new businesses today are started by women.

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Question:

The home of the future may be a so-called “electronic cottage” connected by computer to the outside world and to the workplace. Won’t this put a damper on old-fashioned socializing? 

John Naisbitt:

On the contrary. The electronic cottage won’t go very far because people want to be with people. The more technology you put in society, the more people will seek ways to congregate at movies, restaurants, shopping malls. There will be no end to office meetings. It’s a trade-off I call “high tech/ high touch.”

Question:

Would you explain?

John Naisbitt:

The idea is we put in high technology and then create a compensatory human element, or we reject the technology. For example, simultaneous with the wave of stories about the wide-spread use of computers in schools have been reports about either reviving religion there or teaching courses in values.

Question:

Where’s the political power going?

John Naisbitt:

It’s decentralizing. The percentage of eligible voters casting ballots in presidential and congressional elections continues to decline, but turnouts for local initiatives and referenda are going up—as high as 75 and 80 percent in some areas. State governments in particular are asserting themselves. Nevada, for example, is demanding state control over the four-fifths of its land now under federal jurisdiction. The decentralizing trend is reinforced by states increasingly dealing directly on their own behalf with countries all around the world.

Question:

Don’t you see any threatening clouds on the horizon?

John Naisbitt:

Of course. What are we going to do about our underclass, our industrial workers who need retraining, and our aging population? I don’t have the answers, but I’m convinced changes will come from the local level, with the private sector involved. Just because something must be done doesn’t mean the federal government creates a solution and then we all salute it.•