THE THIRD WAVE

There is, however, a deeper reason for the rise of the spy,

Cowboys, cops, private eyes, adventurers, and explorers—the traditional heroes of print and celluloid—typically pursue the tangible: they want land for cattle, they want money, they want to capture the crook or gain the girl. Not so the spy. For the spy’s basic business is informalion—and information has become perhaps the world’s fastest growing and most important business. The spy is a living symbol of the revolution now sweeping the info-sphere.

A WAREHOUSE OF IMAGES

An information bomb is exploding in our midst, showering us with a shrapnel of images and drastically changing the way each of us perceives and acts upon our private world. In shifting from a Second Wave to a Third Wave info-sphere, we are transforming our own psyches.

Each of us creates in his skull a mind-model of reality—a warehouse of images. Some of these are visual, others auditory, even tactile. Some are only “percepts”—traces of information about our environment, likea glimpse’ of blue sky seen from the corner of the eye. Others are “linkages” that define relationships, like the two words “mother” and child.” Some are simple, others complex and conceptual, like the idea that “inflation is caused by rising wages.” Together such images add up to our picture of the world—locating us in time, space, and the network of personal relationships around us.

These images do not spring from nowhere. They are formed, in ways we do not understand, out of the signals or information reaching us from the environment. And as our environment convulses with change—as our jobs, homes, churches, schools, and political arrangements feel the impact of the Third Wave—the sea of information around us also changes.

Before the advent of mass media, a First Wave child growing up in a slowly changing village built his or her model of reality out of images received from a tiny handful of sources—the teacher, the priest, the chief or official and, above all, the family. As psychologist-futurist Herbert Gerr juoy has noted: “There was no television or radio in the home to give the child a chance to meet many different kinds of strangers from many different walks of life and even from different countries… Very few people ever saw a foreign

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