What is the third wave?
In 1979, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock, where he goes into the process of change in social, political and economic structure.
Alvin describes three “waves”, the first one being the Agrarian Revolution (8000 A.C. Until the 17th Century), during which we built the social paradigms needed to end our nomadic phase and construct the cities that gave origin to our civilization.
The second wave was the industrial revolution (1650), changing the way the world was organized by replacing human effort with advanced tools, thus empowering mass production and expansion, the caveat was that it led to a unification of products, media and ideology, all because of the inflexibility of our tools at the time.
According to Toffler, in 1979 we were in the cusp of a third wave, in which the tools become flexible enough to bring about a change in production paradigm oriented towards individuality and self-expression.
The advent of customized products coupled with the recently established Internet would bring about an important change in human society characterized by decentralization, demassification and personalization… all necessary to satisfy the human need to differentiate. continue reading…
