"A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it. This new civilization brings with it new family styles; changed ways of working, loving, and living; a new economy; new political conflicts; and beyond all this an altered consciousness as well. Pieces of this new civilization exist today. Millions are already attuning their lives to the rhythms of tomorrow. Others, terrified of the future, are engaged in a desperate, futile flight into the past and are trying to restore the dying world that gave them birth.
The dawn of this new civilization is the single most explosive fact of our lifetimes."
- Opening of Chapter One, "Super-Stuggle" in The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.
In my opinion, Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi do a brilliant job of explaining the vast and overwhelming set of changes that are affecting human society during the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century. I consider Alvin Toffler to be the most prescient futurist of my lifetime. The copyright date for my hard-back version of the The Third Wave is 1980.
The metaphor that Toffler employs, waves of civilization change, quickly synthesizes and explains the myriad of changes affecting industry, jobs, society, government institutions, family units, economies and every nook and cranny of human civilization. It describes the variability and massiveness of the changes as they roll like waves across the existing civilization.
Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of "waves"—each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.
- First Wave is the society after agrarian revolution and replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures.
- Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 17th century through the mid-20th century). The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation. Toffler writes: “The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”
- Third Wave is the post-industrial society. According to Toffler, since the late 1950s most nations have been moving away from a Second Wave Society into what he would call a Third Wave Society, one based on actionable knowledge as a primary resource. His description of this (super-industrial society) dovetails into other writers' concepts (like the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, technetronic age, scientific-technological revolution), which to various degrees predicted demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change (one of Toffler’s key maxims is "change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways").
In this blog I will be following the changes that are occurring in our society and relating them back to the concepts of Toffler as well as other theories and predictions of the future. Specifically, Toffler's idea of demassification seems to be a recurring change driver for industries and government. For example, the changes happening in the music industry are a great place to spend time understanding demassification and how to profit from this idea now and in future industry upheavals.
There are many theories and ideas about how and why large changes are taking place. I plan to cover the ones I find relevant and hope to learn about new theories as I go. Alvin Toffler's theories are clearly relevant and give us many ways to try our hand at predicting specific changes that will happen in the future.
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