Alvin Toffler's Waves of Change

The Pre-First Wave

Hunter-Gatherer Societies--The Old Stone Age

In 1980, Alvin Toffler introduced us to a new way of analyzing history, of looking at the world: waves of change. He did so in a book called The Third Wave (New York: W. Morrow, 1980). His particular way of describing or categorizing reality is interesting and has a lot of appeal.

His First Wave began about 12,000 years ago (10,000 b.c.e.). Up until then (or during what archaeologist refer to as the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age--500,000 b.c.e. to about 10,000 b.c.e.), people had been hunter-gatherers living in small nomadic bands of about 30 individuals. These consisted mostly of extended family.

They constantly moved around in search of food, hunting animals and gathering edible plants (leafy greens, roots, nuts, berries, grains, etc.). The small bands of humans often followed herds in their migrations.

Life was generally precarious, and people were at the mercy of the vagaries of the weather and natural disasters. They were often only one step ahead of starvation as, being nomadic, they moved around frequently and could not build stores of food.

The hunter-gatherer social structure was simple and technology poorly developed. Their tools and implements were made of wood, stone, and bone and included such things as hand axes and scrapers, fish hooks and harpoons, spear points and arrow heads.

Then, the First Wave hit.

The First Wave:

The Agricultural Revolution

Alvin Toffler's First Wave began approximately 10,000 years ago. That time marked the end of the Old Stone Age (the Paleolithic) and the beginning of the New Stone Age or the Neolithic. This is approximately when the Agricultural Revolution started. People began clearing land and tilling the soil in order to plant crops as opposed to gathering what nature provided or failed to provide. They also started domesticating animals and herding of cattle.

The new knowledge, techniques, and practices of agriculture provided them with larger and steadier supplies of food. In modern terms, wealth increased. But, preparing land for agriculture was work intensive and time consuming. Appropriate terrain had to be found. Trees had to be cut down, and their roots had to be dug out to make land suitable for planting and harvesting.

As a result, tribes, that had been primarily nomadic in nature, started becoming more and more sedentary. They stopped moving around and following herds' migration patterns, and began building permanent structures, houses, barns, etc. Settlements started to form and grow. Eventually, these expanded into villages, town, and the vast cities and empires of ancient times.

As the knowledge and tools developed, agriculture became more and more efficient and effective in providing food. Wealth grew and became increasing able to support a growing number of people not involved in food production, the nobility, the clergy, and the military. That is, social classes and an early division of labor began to emerge.

Then, the Second Wave hit.

The Second Wave:

The Industrial Revolution

Alvin Toffler's Second Wave was the Industrial Revolution. It ran for the most part from the late 18th to the early 20th century and brought with it mechanization as well as new production techniques such as the assembly line. During that period, the scale of manufacturing activity dramatically increased, giving rise to what we call today, mass production.

The Industrial Revolution is the era that gave rise to the automobile and cheap consumer goods. Despite the hardships often associated with it, it is largely responsible for the massive increases in wealth of the last couple of centuries and the affordability of products in general.

What really gave rise to the Second Wave was one piece of technology, the engine. In cars, it is what enables us to travel in a short time, distances that would have been incommensurable up until a couple of hundred years ago. It is also what makes possible mass markets as it allows for the moving of goods far and wide to vast numbers of people.

But, most of all, the engine is what powers the machinery that produces the huge quantities of items that the industrial society manufactures. It makes possible modern farmers' high productivity levels and their ability to support today's megalopolises. The engine has multiplied the output from human labor by several folds. It was able to do so because of its use of fossil fuels, which were a relatively cheap source of energy up until the middle of 2008.

In his book, The Third Wave (New York: W. Morrow, 1980), Toffler argued that the Second Wave broke apart the producer-consumer function of society, which led to a certain amount of alienation for individuals. People no longer produced what they consumed. They worked in factories, often in mindless and repetitive types of jobs, making goods for sale to others in markets.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, computer technology became more affordable and began making its way up into our homes. 

That is when the Third Wave hit.

The Third Wave:

The Information Age

According to Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave is generally what we refer to as the Information Age. It arose as a result of advances in computer technology and the advent of the Internet. We all have a pretty good idea of what this is about. In 1980 when he published his book, The Third Wave, computers were for the most part bulky mainframe units. Of course, the capacities, capabilities, and sizes have vastly changed since then. What used to take up an entire room now fits in your lap, if not within the palm of your hand.

Computer technology and the networking capabilities afforded by the World Wide Web have totally transformed the world we live in, be it with respect to entertainment (video games, chatting and blogging, etc.), work (word processors, electronic presentations, digitization, speed of information transmission, etc.), or the home (online shopping and banking, new hobbies, etc.).

Unfortunately, along with all the positives from the new technology came a new wave of crime: identity theft, online sexual predation, child pornography, malicious defamation, etc. And of course, also came the cell phone--as indispensable as food to many teenagers.

In terms of Fourth Wave, some have followed in Toffler's footsteps and talked about a greater integration of business and society and more responsible social and environmental roles for the former in general. Others have envisioned such things as biotechnology and nanotechnology. But nothing significant has happened in those respects, at least not on the scale required to produce transformative change.

We see the Fourth Wave as an environmental revolution, as The 21st Century Environmental Revolution.  Could we be right?

More information: UN Sustainable Development Alvin Toffler