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.