The Third Wave

When I started this book, I could not put it down before I finished it. For a month after that, I could not think of anything else but what I have read, and for the next twenty years I had countless occasions to see that the book was profoundly right. The book was written for a lay reader, simple and fun to read, and yet, I am sure that it will be seen as one of the most influential science books of the 20th century. History and sociology have two periods: before and after The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.

I decided to reread this book after 20 years to see how accurately it represented the experiences of the past 20 years. How nice a surprise I received when I found that the broad themes were beautifully portrayed against the background of the prior agricultural and industrial economies. This long term perspective made the articulation of the future vision clearer.

Particularly impressive in retrospect is the description of a forecast for mass customized products. The customer "will become so integrated into the production process that we find it . . . difficult to tell . . . who is the producer." One might be reading about someone ordering a computer on the Dell Web site.

Almost equally impressive is the appreciation of how electronic connections will establish horizontal connections. "Even a partial shift towards the electronic office will be enough to trigger an eruption of social, psychological, and economic consequences." "It promises to restructure all human relationships and roles in the office as well."

Key insights related to:

(1) Companies needing to take on full responsibility for the consequences of their actions on society and the environment;

(2) Companies becoming much more important social institutions of change;

(3) Information moving to the center of major decisions;

(4) Government spreading its influence so that business and politics become inextricably entwined; and

(5) Institutional ethics coming to more closely reflect social ethics.

In fact, this is the first book I have located that sees the business organization as the critical institution in making ecological, moral, political, racial, sexual and social change, as well as the usual transactional ones.

The fundamental vision of humanity as seeking a more appropriate civilization that is built around individual choice in coordinating social interests is a remarkably accurate description of the evolution of the free market democracies over the last 20 years.

Realizing how hard it is to forecast anything, one comes away with a remarkable appreciation for Alvin Toffler's fundamental estimation of human potential. He took that understanding, tied technology to it, and found the answer quite well.

After enjoying this remarkable book (for the first time or) again, I encourage you to consider how these same human characteristics will take us forward in the future. How can you facilitate this felicitous development?

Make your actions and those you cooperate in serve everyone's best interests!

This book attempts to explain the both the nature and the process of the technological revolution that has transformed the world's social and economic systems. To quote Newt Gingrich, US Speaker of the House of Representatives, "Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given us the key to viewing current disarray within the positive framework of a dynamic, exciting future... The Tofflers correctly understand the development and distribution of information that has become the central productivity and power activity of the human race.... In the Third Wave, the Tofflers moved from observation (found in earlier works such as Future Shock) to creating a predictive framework They placed the information revolution (from circa 1990) in an historical perspective, comparing it with the other two great transformations, the agricultural revolution (beginning 8000 B.C thru around 1700) the industrial revolution (beginning around 1700 and still spreading across world society in an ever slower movement) . According to the Tofflers, we are feeling the impact of the third great wave of change in history, and we are, as a result, in the process of creating a new civilization." (Preface to Toffler's Creating a New Civilization)

It is the collision of these concentric waves, and the turbulence created by the interaction of these waves, ie the resistance of industrial-based organizations to information-based systems, that accounts, in their view, for much of the seeming social, political and economic disorder. In short, this book seeks to postulate a paradigm that explains the entire scope of the Information Revolution. It succeeds in this goal as perhaps no other book written to date. For this reviewer, The Third Wave is as thought- provoking as we approach the year 2000 as the book The Greening of America was in the 1970s.

Here are my notes

The government was the great accelerator. Because of its coercive power and tax revenues, it could do things that private enterprise could not afford to undertake. Government could hot up the industrialization process by stepping in to fill emerging gaps in the system - before it became possible or profitable for private companies to do so. Government could perform anticipatory integration. By setting up mass education systems, government helps to engineer youngsters for their future roles in the industrial work force (hence, in effect, subsidizing industry)

Without political integration, economic integration was impossible. Distributors wanting to sell goods over territory outside their own communities ran into different duties, taxes, labor regulations, and currencies. Distributors would have to consolidate with local economy and political consolidation as well

The unification/ integration of political system and economic system led to the division of world into distinct national units. As each government sought to extend its market and its political authority, it came up against outer limits - language differences, cultural, social, geographic, and strategic barriers. The available transport, communication, and energy supplies, the productivity of its technology, all set limits on how large an area could be effectively ruled by a single political structure. The sophistication of accounting procedures, budgetary controls, and management techniques also determined how far political integration could reach.
Within these limits, the integrational elites, corporate and government alike, fought for expansion. The broader the territory under their control and the bigger the economic market area, the greater their wealth and power became. As each nation stretched its economic and political frontiers to the utmost, it ran up not merely against these inherent limits but also against rival nations

Imperialism - negotiations between centre and peripheral was often totally lopsided. Often local rulers or entrepreneurs were simply bought off by the Westerners, offered bribes or personal gain in return for sweating the native labor force, putting down resistance, or rewriting local laws in favor of the outsiders. Once conquering a colony, the imperial power often set preferential raw-material prices for its own businessmen and erected stiff barriers to prevent the traders of rival nations from bidding prices up.
Many raw material needed by Westerners were virtually valueless to the local populations who had them.

Geography was embedded in our voting systems. Elected officials are representatives of the inhabitants of a particular piece of land; a geographical district. Political systems assume that people would remain in one locality all their lives. Hence the prevalence of residency requirements in voting regulations

Synchronization. Standardization. Linearization. They affected the root assumptions of the civilization and they brought massive changes in the way ordinary people handled time in their lives. But if time itself was transformed, space, too, had to be repackaged to fit into the new indust-reality.
Spatially extensive to spatially restrictive existence
Schedules - by synchronizes social interaction and coordinates social activity it sets limits to them

Today's corporate critics attack the artificial divorce of economics from politics, morality and the other dimensions of life. They hold the corporation increasingly responsible for, not merely for its economic performance but for its side effects - environmental, social, informational, political, and moral. Corporate executives are now required to pay attention to multiple bottom lines. A corporation is no longer simply responsible for making profit or producing goods but for simultaneously contributing to the solution of extremely complex ecological, moral, political, racial, sexual, and social problems. In this finely strung socio-sphere, corporate decisions are closely scrutinized. Social pollution produced by the corporation in the form of unemployment, community disruption, forced mobility, and the like is instantly spotted, and pressures are placed on the corporation to assure far greater responsibility than ever before for its social, as well as economic, products.
The new importance of information leads to conflict over the control of corporate data - battles over disclosure of more information to the public, demands for open accounting, more pressure for truth in advertising, or truth in lendings.

Rise of the do it yourself industry reasons. Inflation. The difficulty of getting a carpenter or plumber. Shoddy work. Expanded leisure. All these play a part. A more potent reason is what might be called the Law of Relative Inefficiency. This holds that the more we automate the production of goods and lower their per unit cost, the more we increase the relative cost of handcrafts and nonautomated services. For such reasons, we must expect the price of many services to continue their skyrocketing climb in the years ahead. And as these prices soar, we can expect people to do more and more for themselves. In short, even without inflation, the Law of Relative Inefficiency would make it increasingly profitable for people to produce for their own consumption.

With the emergence of multinational corporations, the organization of independent sovereign states is now being overlaid by a network of economic institutions. With their ability to shunt billions back and forth instantly across national boundaries, their power to deploy technology and to move relatively quickly, they have often outflanked and outrun national governments.

For industrialization to operate successfully in third world nations traditional family and marriage customs, religion, and role structure would all have to be crushed, the entire culture ripped up by its roots

Configuration - The relatively concentration mass media. Individuals were continually encouraged to compare themselves to a relatively small number of role models, and to evaluate their life styles against a few preferred possibilities. In consequence, the range of socially approved personality styles was relatively narrow. The demassification of media presents a dazzling diversity of role models and life style for one to measure oneself against. Moreover, the new media do not feed us fully formed chunks, but broken chips and blips of imagery. Instead of being handed a selection of coherent identities to choose among, we are required to piece one together: a configurative or modular me. This is far more difficult, and it explains why so many millions are desperately searching for identity.

Perhaps the reason that Alvin Toffler's classic book feels so relevant some 25 years after its initial publication is the fact that he wrote it in a time which, in retrospect, was not so different from our own: The world was trembling before the threat of terrorism embodied, in Toffler's age, by Iranian terrorists, and radical new technologies, in the form of powerful and increasingly affordable computers, were drastically altering business and society. But probably, the book resonates simply because he was right about almost everything. For that reason, we from getAbstract recommend this book as a basic requirement for any professional.