In the annals of contemporary change literature, Alvin Toffler is the 600-pound gorilla. He and his wife and collaborator Heidi Toffler have written a baker's dozen of books that have all been best-sellers, starting way, way back in 1970 with Future Shock. The family tree of thousands of books about the future, and about how to cope with it, all lead to the leafy canopy where he makes his roost.
He has written about society, culture, the media, organizations, science, computers, politics, and economics. We could easily have picked his brain for an entire day. So how much could we expect to squeeze from him in 90 minutes?
Quite a lot, as it turned out. Toffler's session was like one of those pony cart rides you take through Old Williamsburg, only the driver is going at breakneck speed, and the pony is wide-eyed and snorting, and what you are looking at is not a restoration of the past, but fleeting glimpses of the future.
Wave theory
The central premise of Toffler's talk was that human history, while it is complex and contradictory, can be seen to fit patterns. The pattern he has been seeing in his career takes the shape of three great advances or waves. The first wave of transformation began when some prescient person about 10,000 years ago, probably a woman, planted a seed and nurtured its growth. The age of agriculture began, and its significance was that people moved away from nomadic wandering and hunting and began to cluster into villages and develop culture.
The second wave was an expression of machine muscle, the Industrial Revolution that began in the 18th century and gathered steam after America's Civil War. People began to leave the peasant culture of farming to come to work in city factories. It culminated in the Second World War, a clash of smokestack juggernauts, and the explosion of the atomic bombs over Japan.
Just as the machine seemed at its most invincible, however, we began to receive intimations of a gathering third wave, based not on muscle but on mind. It is what we variously call the information or the knowledge age, and while it is powerfully driven by information technology, it has co-drivers as well, among them social demands worldwide for greater freedom and individuation.
