Alvin Toffler’s view of the future is wonderfully captured in the book “The Third Wave”

If one were to look around the institutions relating to politics, business, technology, communications, technology, etc that were regarded as strengths of human civilization, one can see that they are facing a lot of pressures and forces in the current age. The author describes these institutional structures as Second Wave structures i.e industrial revolution structures and sees their end in the coming years.

One aspect of the book which is particularly interesting is the way author describes the pre and post Industrial Revolution. There are umpteen numbers of times where I tried to analyze the reasons for the rise of Second Wave and hypothesize the reasons for the upcoming of the Third Wave which will bring to the structure to the current chaotic society. I attribute the word chaos to the current society as the events in it do not clarify a structure which is emerging out of it. The information flows of the events are pretty random where sports, technology, politics issues make news with no linkages whatsoever between them. We are essentially living in a blip culture

What are the assumptions are behind the Second Wave?
The second wave was built on few premises. One being that Nature can be used or exploited for the energy needs of the society. Secondly, Raw materials are going to be much costlier.

The biggest after effects of Industrialization are
1. Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Concentration, Maximization and Centralization.
2. Division of production and consumption where earlier in the First Wave, it was done by the same person/ family
3. Emergence of Markets

Each of these affected the techno sphere, info sphere, socio sphere and psycho sphere of an individual’s life.

Why Third Wave?
Creation of energy, Making things and distributing them are the three activities of any economy. The way in which the three activities were carried on in the Second Wave has come under tremendous pressure.
Non-renewable forms of energy have become such a scarce commodity that oil prices now dictate virtually everything from political agreements to stock market performance to consumer behavior and a host of other aspects. But one thing we must remember that these forces will destabilize a lot of institutions and hence there will be an urgent need for creating energy from other means.

What will be traits of Third Wave?
1.Electronic Cottage: Working from home and work being shared by the family
Intelligent Environment: Rise of Computers and Micro electronics which makes our environment very intelligent
2.End of 9 – 5 Jobs
3.Schedule a friend services
4.De-massified economy (production/consumption/distribution)
5.De-massified media
6.Rise of Prosumer
7.Crack up of Nation State
8.End of Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Concentration, Maximization and Centralization.

There are Zillions of ideas that they cannot be summarized by a short summary. One has to read the book to understand its implications on the future.

The biggest learning for me is that one can create applications, industries by having a good foresight and always listening and scanning environment
The book was published in 1977 and as I read through the book, I could see a host of businesses and applications that have hit the market and have become immensely successful. A few being Yahoo Messenger, Eliyon.com, Tivo, Social Networking sites, need for effective routers, Dell’s No inventory model. In one or the other form, the book was clearly saying these are the technologies which will hit the market.

The experience of reading this book more than confirms my belief that businessman need to be good readers too, for one never knows where a gem of statement has been made by learned scholars and futurists.