Tampines Junior College

JC 1 Promotional Examination 2008

General Certificate of Education

GENERAL PAPER 8806/2

PAPER 2:
INSERT

Monday 8 September 2008 1 hour 30 minutes

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES

This insert contains the passage for Paper 2.

This insert consists of 3 printed pages including this page.

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 THE ORIGINS OF OVERCHOICE

Alvin Toffler argues that the assumption that society will become more uniform as industrialism
progresses needs to be reconsidered.

1 The Super-industrial Revolution will consign to the archives of ignorance most 1

of what we now believe about the future of human choice. Most writers conjure
up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer
creatures, surrounded by standardized goods, educated in standardized
schools, fed a diet of standardized mass culture and forced to adopt 5
standardized styles of life. Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not
from an absence of choice, but from a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn
out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma - overchoice.

2 No person travelling across Europe or the United States can fail to be

impressed by the architectural similarity of one gas station or airport to 10
another. Anyone thirsting for a soft drink will find one bottle of Coca-Cola to be
almost identical with the next. Certainly it would be difficult to deny that
industrialism has had a levelling effect. Our ability to produce millions of nearly
identical units is the crowning achievement of the industrial age.

3 However, the end of standardization is already in sight. From a single 15

homogenous unit, the mass market has exploded into a series of segmented,
fragmented markets, each with its own needs, tastes and way of life. The
result is an astonishing change in the actual outpouring of goods offered to the
consumer. Philip Morris, for example, sold a single major brand of cigarettes
for twenty-one years. It has since introduced six new brands and so many 20
options with respect to size, filter and menthol that the smoker now has a
choice among sixteen different variations. This fact would be trivial were it not
duplicated in virtually every major product field. Groceries? In the past, the
number of different soaps and detergents on the American grocery shelf
increased from 65 to 200; frozen foods from 121 to 350. Even the variety of pet 25
foods increased from 58 to 81.

4 This is the point that our social critics - most of whom are technologically naive
– fail to understand: it is only primitive technology that imposes
standardization. Automation in contrast, frees the path to endless, blinding,
mind-numbing diversity. The rigid uniformity and long runs of identical products 30
which characterize our traditional mass production plants are becoming less
important. Numerically controlled machines can readily shift from one product
model or size to another by a single change of programmes. Short runs
become economically feasible. Automated equipment permits the production of
a wide variety of products in short runs at almost ‘mass production costs’. 35
Many engineers and business experts foresee the day when diversity will cost
no more than uniformity.

5 Does any of this matter? Some people argue that diversity in the material
environment is insignificant so long as we are racing toward cultural or spiritual
homogeneity. This view gravely underestimates the importance of material 40
goods as symbolic expressions of human personality differences, and it
foolishly denies a connection between the inner and outer environment. Those
who fear the standardization of human beings should warmly welcome the de-
standardization of goods. For by increasing the diversity of goods available to
man we increase the mathematical probability of differences in the way men 45
actually live, as evident in the arts, education and the mass media.

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 6 One highly revealing test of cultural diversity in any literate society has to do
with the number of different books published per million of population. The
more standardized the tastes of the public, the fewer titles will be published per
million; the more diverse these tastes, the greater the number of titles. The 50
increase in this figure in recent years provides dramatic evidence of a powerful
shift towards de-standardisation.

7 The same push towards pluralism is evident in painting too, where we find an
almost incredible wide spectrum of production. Representationalism,
expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, hardedge, pop, kinetic and 55
a hundred other styles are pumped into society at the same time. One or
another may dominate the galleries temporarily, but there are no universal
standards or styles. It is a pluralistic marketplace.

8 Moreover, in the educational world of tomorrow, that relic of mass production,

the centralized work place will also become less important. Just as economic 60
mass production required a large number of workers to be assembled in
factories, educational mass production required large numbers of students to
be assembled in schools. This itself, with its demands for uniform discipline,
regular hours, attendance checks and the like, was a standardizing force.
Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A 65
good deal of education will take place in the students’ own home or in a dorm,
at hours of his own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to him via
computerized information retrieval systems, he will be freed for much of his
time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged him in the lockstep
classroom. 70

9 Computers, in addition, make it easier for a large school to schedule more

flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study,
with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular
activities. More important, computer-assisted education, programmed
instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, 75
radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. They permit each
student to advance at his own purely personal pace. They permit him to follow
a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the
traditional era classroom.

10 Everywhere, the “market segmentation” process is at work. A generation ago, 80

American movie-goers saw almost nothing but Hollywood-made films aimed at
capturing the so-called mass audience. Today, these mainstream movies are
supplemented by foreign movies, art films and a whole stream of specialized
motion pictures consciously designed to appeal to sub–markets. Meanwhile,
hand-held cameras and new video-tape equipment are similarly revolutionizing 85
the ground rules of camera. New technology has put camera and film into the
hands of thousands of students and amateurs, and the underground movie –
crude, colorful, perverse, highly individualized and localized - is flourishing
even more that the underground press.

11 Whether man is prepared to cope with the increased choice of material and 90
cultural wares available to him is, however, a totally different question. From
there comes a time when choice, rather than freeing the individual, becomes
so complex, difficult and costly, that it turns into the opposite. There comes a
time, in short, when choice turns into overchoice and freedom into un-freedom.

Adapted from ‘Future Shock’ by Alvin Toffler.

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