Week 2 Assignment: Alvin Toffler’s Wave Theory
First Wave: -8000 to 1750 (Agriculture Age)
Alvin Toffler's First Wave began approximately 10,000 years ago. That time marked the
end of the Old Stone Age (the Paleolithic) and the beginning of the New Stone Age or the
Neolithic. This is referred to as Alvin Theory First Wave and it began approximately
when the Agricultural Revolution started. People began clearing land and tilling the soil
in order to plant crops as opposed to gathering what nature provided or failed to provide.
They also started domesticating animals and herding of cattle.
The new knowledge, techniques, and practices of agriculture provided them with larger
and steadier supplies of food. In modern terms, wealth increased. But, preparing land for
agriculture was work intensive and time consuming. Appropriate terrain had to be found.
Trees had to be cut down, and their roots had to be dug out to make land suitable for
planting and harvesting. As a result, tribes, that had been primarily nomadic in nature,
started becoming more and more sedentary. They stopped moving around and following
herds' migration patterns, and began building permanent structures, houses, barns, etc.
Settlements started to form and grow. Eventually, these expanded into villages, town, and
the vast cities and empires of ancient times.
The age of agriculture began, and its significance was that people moved away from
nomadic wandering and hunting and began to cluster into villages and develop culture. In
the first wave, wealth was land, and it was exclusive; if I choose to grow rice on my
acres, you could not tell me otherwise. As the knowledge and tools developed, agriculture
became more and more efficient and effective in providing food. Wealth grew and
became increasing able to support a growing number of people not involved in food
production, the nobility, the clergy, and the military. That is, social classes and an early
division of labor began to emerge.
Second Wave: 1750-1955 (Industrial Age)
Alvin Toffler's Second Wave was the Industrial Revolution. It ran for the most part from
the late 18th to the early 20th century and brought with it mechanization as well as new
production techniques such as the assembly line. During that period, the scale of
manufacturing activity dramatically increased, giving rise to what we call today, mass
production. The Industrial Revolution is the era that gave rise to the automobile and
cheap consumer goods. Despite the hardships often associated with it, it is largely
responsible for the massive increases in wealth of the last couple of centuries and the
affordability of products in general.
A central theme of the industrial regime was centralization and standardization. Where
the first wave lacked the technology to connect locale to locale, and to organize large
systems, the second wave provided highway systems, cars, telephones, and mainframe
computers, linking remote outposts to central controls. At the height of the second wave
everything was mass, from mass production to mass destruction. Both Alvin and Heidi
Toffler worked in factories when they were young, and they knew, as all factory workers
of that era knew, that the job was to turn out the longest possible line of identical
products. This was one point on which assembly-line capitalist Henry Ford and assembly
line Marxist Joseph Stalin could agree: the virtue of mass production. The larger the
quantity, the cheaper the run.
Economics has been lovingly defined as "the science of the allocation of scarce
resources." From the standpoint of the third wave, in which the primary resource is
knowledge, that second-wave definition rings hollow. In the first place, economics has
never been much of a science, Toffler said. More to the point, our supply of knowledge is
anything but scarce. What really gave rise to the Second Wave was one piece of
technology, the engine. In cars, it is what enables us to travel in a short time, distances
that would have been incommensurable up until a couple of hundred years ago.
It is also what makes possible mass markets as it allows for the moving of goods far and
wide to vast numbers of people. But, most of all, the engine is what powers the
machinery that produces the huge quantities of items that the industrial society
manufactures. It makes possible modern farmers' high productivity levels and their ability
to support today's megalopolises. The engine has multiplied the output from human labor
by several folds. It was able to do so because of its use of fossil fuels, which were a
relatively cheap source of energy up until the middle of 2008.
The second wave was an expression of machine muscle, the Industrial Revolution that
began in the 18th century and gathered steam after America's Civil War. People began to
leave the peasant culture of farming to come to work in city factories. It culminated in the
Second World War, a clash of smokestack juggernauts, and the explosion of the atomic
bombs over Japan. In his book, The Third Wave (New York: W. Morrow, 1980), Toffler
argued that the Second Wave broke apart the producer-consumer function of society,
which led to a certain amount of alienation for individuals. People no longer produced
what they consumed. They worked in factories, often in mindless and repetitive types of
jobs, making goods for sale to others in markets.
Third Wave: 1955-1990 (Information Age)
According to Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave is generally what we refer to as the
Information Age. It arose as a result of advances in computer technology and the advent
of the Internet. We all have a pretty good idea of what this is about. In 1980 when he
published his book, The Third Wave, computers were for the most part bulky mainframe
units. Of course, the capacities, capabilities, and sizes have vastly changed since then.
What used to take up an entire room now fits in your lap, if not within the palm of your
hand. Again, the Tofflers have coined a term for a third-wave predicament, familiar to
anyone who has surfed the Internet, shopped at a warehouse grocery store, or installed
satellite download television: overchoice. Mass culture has not vanished with the arrival
of the third wave.
The tyranny of the factory inspired a bleak futurism in which Big Brother ruled the planet
through centralized information control. But something happened that prevented the
nightmares of George Orwell (1984) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) from
coming to pass. Technology took a sharp turn away from standardization and toward
individuation and diversity. In a not-always-pleasant way, the third wave began
decentralizing the machine heart. Today is a time of transition, in which we witness the
curious spectacle of massive second-wave-type enterprises adapting to the third-wave
appetite for differentiation.
Take the coffee example; in the 1920s each town had its distinct coffee flavor. In the
1970s it was Maxwell House and McDonald's scalding coffee, from sea to shining sea.
By the 1990s, an explosion of mom-and-pop coffeehouses took place across the country.
Today you stop, as I did recently, at a coffee shop in Talladega, Alabama, and order a
double latte of decaffeinated Kenyan with a finger of amaretto hazelnut syrup in .
Or you can have the best of all worlds; second wave McDonalds' standardization
combined with third wave product choice, by walking into any of the 2,000 Starbucks
coffee shops nationwide.
In retail, we have witnessed the second-wave juggernaut Wal-Mart break upon cities
small and large, with the third-wave possibility of a single store selling 100,000 different
items. Again, the Tofflers have coined a term for a third-wave predicament, familiar to
anyone who has surfed the Internet, shopped at a warehouse grocery store, or installed
satellite download television: overchoice. Mass culture has not vanished with the arrival
of the third wave. We still have Disney, rock and roll, Power ball, and CBS.
But alongside these mainstream cultural entities, there have developed a vast array of
demassified niches. The Usenet on Internet boasts 10,000 special interest newsgroups. On
the radio it is possible to turn the dial and find stations dedicated to certain types of
music, from classical and contemporary true bluegrass, zydeco, salsa, tejana, tropical,
bomba, and bangra. To a thousand different strains, the tastes of individuals are emerging
as a market force to be dealt with.
The clearest sign of changing politics is the decay of political parties. The day when a
Franklin Roosevelt can put together a string of four elections by combining a handful of
voter blocs (farmers, labor, intellectuals, the rural South, and the urban North) into a
single lasting coalition is gone. Election today requires stringing together hundreds of
splintered grassroots groups: the nonsmokers, AIDS activists, save-the-whales people and
what-have-you.
Every group is passionate, and narrow in focus. It is in every way a more daunting
process, and it is conducted, as making frankfurters should not be, in full view of the
public. It is no wonder that no one, in the United States, in Japan, in Italy, or anywhere,
believes in parties any more. Parties were static second-wave, homogenized, and
massified functions that do not seem relevant in the more volatile, diversified,
heterogeneous third wave.
Computer technology and the networking capabilities afforded by the World Wide Web
have totally transformed the world we live in, be it with respect to entertainment (video
games, chatting and blogging, etc.), work (word processors, electronic presentations,
digitization, speed of information transmission, etc.), or the home (online shopping and
banking, new hobbies, etc.). Unfortunately, along with all the positives from the new
technology came a new wave of crime: identity theft, online sexual predation, child
pornography, malicious defamation, etc. And of course, also came the cell phone--as
indispensable as food to many teenagers.
Fourth Wave: 1990 – 2000 (Communication Age)
In terms of Fourth Wave, some have followed in Toffler's footsteps and talked about a
greater integration of business and society and more responsible social and environmental
roles for the former in general. Others have envisioned such things as biotechnology and
nanotechnology. But nothing significant has happened in those respects, at least not on
the scale required to produce transformative change.
Reference:
Toffler, A., The Third Wave (New York: W. Morrow, 1980),