Notes on Alvin Toffler: Future Shock + The Third Wave

http://www.alvintoffler.net/?fa=bios

What differentiates the Tofflers from others who today echo this view is their insistence that there can be no economic transformation without a corresponding upheaval in our social, political and cultural institutions and values.

In support of this idea, the Tofflers draw not merely on economics, but on social psychology, military history, politics, pop culture and religion, revealing the hidden or unnoticed relations among them - and their implications for the decisions we make today.

http://www.ameinfo.com/44149.html

“3rd wave” book argues huge historic changes:
1. hunting and gathering to agriculture
2. rise of industrial age and all the things that go with it, mass production, factories
3. rise of a knowledge based economy

The central feature of his futurology is to note patterns in human history.

Toffler's idea of leadership is one of the ability to handle change, and improve existing practices. As he argues: 'In every company new ideas, new products, and new people are waiting to be born. The leader's task is to get them out and breathing.

'In the third wave, good ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. It may mean courage, imagination, entrepreneurialism, warmth, organizational savvy or street smarts. These are the kinds of brains that will thrive in the third wave.'

He thinks the leaders of tomorrow must be 'managers of adaptation equipped with a whole set of new, nonlinear skills.' And this guru of the future suggests: 'The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.'

http://www.yoyow.com/marye/tofflers94.html

"future shock"--when too much change hits too fast for people to absorb, they then began to show signs of either deteriorated decision-making capability or disorientation; indeed, in some cases, stress and illness and so forth. Future shock is the consequence of the premature arrival of the future.

The Third Wave, ten years after Future Shock. That book said that the changes around us are not entirely random, that you can see patterns, and that basically what was happening was a revolutionary upheaval on a par with, or even greater than, the industrial revolution--or indeed the agrarian revolution that came first. We used the terminology First Wave, Second Wave, Third Wave.

Then came the industrial revolution of two or three hundred years ago, which launched what we call the second great transformatory wave in history, and gave rise to an industrial civilization. That industrial civilization had multiple forms. It had capitalists and communists; it had Japanese, Korean, Swedish, or American versions; but all of the industrial countries, by definition, were based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass entertainment. Sociologists referred to it as the mass society.

The old scenarios, the scenarios of Orwell and Huxley and hundreds, if not thousands, of science fiction writers, saw the continual advance of technology as necessarily increasing the industrial character of society--making it more bureaucratic, more centralized, more impersonal, more robotoid, and so on.

There is a contrast between second and third wave, where 2nd is based on mass society produced by industrial civilization, while computer age is more singular and independent.
Military on the contrary to mass production where they are participating in demassification of no assembly line.

http://www.solutioneers.net/solutioneering/thirdwave.html

Second Wave society and Expansionism is based on 3 beliefs:
1. Nature is to be exploited.
2. Humans are pinnacle of long process of evolution.
3. History flows irreversibly towards the progress of a better life for humanity.