A new civilization has emerged in our lives bringing with it new family styles, changed ways of working, loving and living, a new economy, new political conflicts and naturally an altered consciousness as well. We may have already adjusted to this new tomorrow but many, terrified of the future, have been attempting to restore their dying world that have given their identity evading all thrusts of this explosive new civilization.
The First Wave of accelerative change erupted ten thousand years ago by the invention of agriculture followed by the Second Wave with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The next phase of transformation, or the Third Wave, was described as a Space Age, Information Age, Electronic Era or the now banal term of global village. Zbigniew Brzezinksi had fashioned a term called “technetronic age” while Daniel Bell described the coming of a “post-industrial society”. Soviet futurists even spoke of the STR, a “scientific-technological revolution”. All this histrionic intellectualization cannot, however, expand on the full force, scope and dynamism of future changes or the potential pressures and conflicts they trigger.
Humanity faces the most significant social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. The habitat for humanity will change as families are torn apart, economies shattered, values disrupted and political systems and fragile political systems providing an indicator of what the key power struggles of tomorrow will be.
Our new way of life will be based on diversified, renewable energy sources; new, non-nuclear families; novel institutions such as online communities or chat rooms and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future. The Third Wave civilization will, as Alvin Toffler suggested, will “heal the historic breach between producer and consumer giving rise to the prosumer economics of tomorrow. This phase could possibly be the first truly humane civilization in recorded history.
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