The Third Wave - De-massifying the Media

The secret agent is one of the most powerful metaphors of these days. No other character has so succesfully caught the contemporany imagination. A lot of movies glorify 007 agent and his brash fictional counterparts. Television and books churn out plenty images of spy as romantic, daring, amoral, superior or inferior to his peers.

Before the advent of mass-media, a child grown in a slowly changing village during the First Wave built his or her own model of reality born from a few sources like the teacher, the priest, the chief or official and, above all, the family.

The Second Wave multiplied the number of channels through which an individual could draw his or her model of reality. The child no longer received information only from nature or people, but also from newspapers, magazines, radio and latter from television.

Some images like Charlie Chaplin with a topper and a stick or Hitler yelling at Nurnberg, Churchill making the V sign, Marilyn Monroe's skirt blown by the wind or Roosevelt wearing a black cape were so widely distributed and implemented in people's memories, that they were transformed practically in icons.

These centrally produced images, injected into the "mass mind" by the mass media helped producing the standardizational behaviour required by the Industrial production system.

But today, the Third Wave is drastically modifying all these. A lot of new information reaches us every moment and we are obligged to revise our image-files at a faster and faster rate almost continuously.

Chapter XI and XII, The New Syntesis and Commanding

It's easy to say that the future starts now. But which future? Because our's is full of paradoxes. Children know a lot about drugs, sex and space travel, some know much more about computers than their parents. But school test results are increasingly worse, the percentage of divorces increases, so the remarriage index. Antifeminisme occur even when women win more rights that the antifeminist agree with. Also homosexuals strongly demand their rights.

In all countries of the Second Wave it reigns an intractable inflation and unemployment still continues to grow. The political parties can not count on commitment of their members, and simultaneously in large areas of the world, nationalist movements are amplified.

Future flows, it is not frozen, getting shape due to built-changing decisions we make daily, every phenomenon influencing the others.

One way to come to light is to look beyond the various technologies and policies, to their principles. If you do this, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or expand the power of the Second Wave, as we know, while the other is based on new principles.

In today's world, cost and not resources exert the most important and straight influence. We are now shaping the energy that will work on principles almost diametrically opposed to the past 300 years. It is also clear that the energy of the Third Wave will not be achieved without a fierce fight.

Although the Second Wave forces may seem strong and their Third Wave critics weak, it would be foolish to rely too much on the past. The real issue is not whether the energy of the Second Wave will be abolished and replaced, but how soon it will occur.

Nowadays, four groups of related industries are ready to develop and will likely become the industrial foundation of theThird Wave.

Electronics and electronic computers is one of these groups. According to the magazine "Computerworld", "If the automobile industry would have made what the computer industry has made over the past 30 years, a Rolls-Royce would cost $ 250 and would consume a gallon to 2 million miles." Consumers have been flooded with hand calculators, watches with diodes and games on the TV screen.

Space industry is a second group of the nascent technosphere. In space there is no gravity to complicate things, there is no need of containers and handling highly toxic or reactive substances poses no problems. There are, however, an inexhaustible stock of vacuum, and excessively low and high temperatures.

Chapter X, CODA: The Flash Flood

There is still a question: What caused the industrial revolution? Which set in motion thesecond wave?

Discovering The New World boosted the culture and the economy of Europe on the eve of the industrial revolution. Demographic growth stimulated migration to cities. The British forests' depletion led to the use of British coal and thus the improvement of steam machinery.


Any research for the cause of the industrial revolution is doomed to failure, because there is no single or primary cause.


The greater the divorce of producer from consumer, the more increased the market dominance.This separation resulted in many of the pressures that led to standardization, specialization, synchronization and centralization. It is the cause of differentiation of roles and temperament of the two sexes.

The Second Wave civilization has not only changed the technique, nature and culture. It changed personality, helping to create a new social character. Industrial man has struggled to earn a living, to understand that the earth and the clock hand lead him without going back to the future, to the grave. The Second Wave changed the familiar sounds, replacing the cock with the factory siren and the crickets' song with cars tires' gnashing, lighted the night, extended the hours of wakefulness, brought pictures of the sky, montage cinema or biological forms revealed for the first time by strong microscopes. The smell of wet earth had been replaced by the smell of gasoline. Meat and vegetables' taste changed.The same thing happened to the human body which reached the today's normal stature. Starting with the Second Wave nakedness began to be shameful. From a time in which it was a pleasure to see a dead animal on the table things changed to one in which any sign that would remember how that had to do with the death of an animal should be avoided.Marriage became more than just an economic relief. Despite major economic crisis and a terrible waste of human lives, the civilization of the Second Wave clearly improved the material life of the common man, but caused violent and external consequences, unforeseen side effects, including excessive damage perhaps irreparable of the fragile biosphere. Civilization of the Second Wave did more havoc in the environment than any other time prior.The second wave was a bitter-sweet moment in eternity  that would shape the rest of our lives but if you listen carefully, you can hear the Third Wave rolling on the not very distant shores.

Chapters VII, VIII, IX - A Frenzy of Nations, The Imperial Drive, Indust-reality

Without political integration the economic integration would have impossible to achieve. New and costly technologies brought by the second wave could not have been written off unless they were used to produce goods for local markets higher than the local ones.


The new imperialism, become from "small" "large",was not peripheral anymore, but as integrated in the basic economic structure of industrial countries, that the jobs of millions of ordinary workers had come to depend on it. And it was not just about jobs.Europe also needed increasing amounts. As mass production was developing the new industrial elite needed larger markets and new investment opportunities.

Once the trade exceed the national boundaries, each national market became a part of a larger regional or continental markets linked together and, finally, part of a single unified exchange system designed for integration elites who ran the civilization of the Second Wave. Around the world a unique network of money was woven.

In 1492 when Columbus set foot in the new world, Europeans ruled only 9% of the world. In 1801 dominated a third. In 1880 two thirds. In 1935 Europeans politically controlled 85% of dry land and 70% of the population.


When it began to spread in any area, the Second Wave civilization was carrying with it more than technique or trade, redefined as beauty, love, god, justice, power, or even... reality. It launched ideas, attitudes and analogies, being born the notion of "industrial realism". Therefore, during the Second Wave civilization, three basic concepts - the struggle with nature, the importance of evolution and the principle of progress - provided the ammunition used by agencies to explain and justify industrialism worldwide.

Chapters IV, V, VI - Breaking the Code, The Technicians of Power, The Hidden Blueprint

The acute conflict existing in schools, business circles and in the circles leading the world today is focused largely on six principles spread by industrialism: standardization (applying this principle, the Second Wave equalized differences at many levels), specialization (the Second Wave replaced the good at all peasant with the narrow, but pretentious specialist and with the worker who always repeat the same operation; it also made ​​a clear difference between consumer and producer), synchronization, concentration, maximization, centralization (a classic example can be the first railroad; the staff was divided in "operating" and "leadership", were initiated daily reports, the central bank was created). These principles have led to the development bureaucracy.


Industrialism broke the community life and the culture. The desire to put things back together gave birth to many specialists. Their purpose was to integrate and they were the integrators.  They were defining roles, assigning jobs, deciding wages, establishing criteria and giving or not recommendations. They linked the production, marketing, transport and communications, established laws of interaction of businesses and institutions, assembling the pieces that make up society. So was born the numerous government, the big accelerator.

In economics, the first integrators were factory owners, entrepreneurs, owners of spinning and hardware manufacturers.

There were also the super-elites who were the decision-makers and those who made ​​the major investment allocations.

It was not easy for the creators of the second wave of political systems to imagine, after millennia of agriculture, an economy based on capital, labor, energy and raw materials, not on earth.

Revolutionary Readers of the societies in the second wave, capitalists or socialists, invented the political institutions with many features of the machines in the early industrial age. Structures that  shaped and mounted them were based on representation. In each country were used several standard features such as voting citizens, parties for collecting votes, candidates to win votes and become people's representatives, legislators, leaders. The votes were the base of the mechanism and were the mirror of the "Will of the people". The government representative became the symbol of an "advanced" nation, but it never actually was under the control of the people, because it was being managed by the elites.

Representative form of government - democracy, as we have been taught to call it - was,  in short, an industrial technology to ensure the inequality.

Chapters II and III, The Architecture of Civilization and The Invisible Wedge

By the mid-twentieth century, the first wave forces were defeated and civilization of the second wave has seized hold of the earth. Industrial civilization had almost a billion people, a quarter of the global population.


Companies from the first wave were supplied with energy from "living batteries" - human and animal muscle - power and the sun, wind and water, so renewable energy sources. Instead, all companies in the second wave began to source energy from coal, natural gas and oil - Non-renewable fossil fuel.


During the second wave the postal services was also created and aroused passionate enthusiasm. The American orator Edwart Everett said: "I am compelled to regard the Post-office, next to Christianity, as the right arm of our modern civilization."


During the first wave, most work was done on the field or in the household, while the second wave displaced workers in the factory and introduced a much higher degree of interdependence.


The two halves of human life that has separated the second wave are production and consumption. Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the food, goods and services produced by the human race was consumed by the producers themselves, their families or a small elite who manage to snatch the surplus for its own use.


Housewives continued to meet a number of crucial economic functions, but were producing only for family use, not for the market. You might say that men had turned to the future, while women remained in the past.