THE THIRD WAVE
This centrally produced imagery, injected into the “mass mind” by the mass media; helped produce the standardization of behavior required by the Industrial production system.
Today the Third Wave is drastically altering all this. As change accelerates in society it forces a parallel acceleration within us. New information reaches us and we are forced to revise our image-file continuously at a faster and faster rate. Older images based on past reality must be replaced, for, unless we update them, our actions become divorced from reality and we become progressively less competent. We find it impossible to cope.
This speedup of image processing inside «s means that images grow mqre and more empnrary Thrnwawav art, one-shot sitcoms, Polaroid snapshots, Xerox copies, and disposable graphics pop up and vanish. Ideas, beliefs, and attitudes skyrocket into consciousness, are challenged, defied, and suddenly fade into nowhere-ness; Scientific and psychological theories are overthrown and superseded daily.Ideologies crack. Celebrities pirouette fleetingly across our awareness. Contradictory political and moral slogans assail us.
It is difficult to make sense of this swirling phantasmagoria, to understand exactly how the image-manufacturing process is changing. For the Third Wave does more than simply accelerate our information flows: it transforms the deep structure of information on which our daily actions depend.
THE DE-MASSIFIED MEDIA
Throughout the Second Wave era the mass media grew more and more powerful. Today a startling change is taking place. As the Third Wave thunders in, the mass media, far from expanding their influence, are suddenly being forced to share it. They are being beaten back on many fronts at once by what I call the “de-massified media.”
Newspapers provide the first example. The oldest of the Second Wave’mass media, newspapers are losing their readers. By 1973 U.S. newspapers had reached a combined aggregate circulation of 63 million copies daily. Since 1973, however, instead of adding circulation, they have begun to lose it. By 1978 the total had declined to 62 million and worse was in store. The percentage of Americans who read a paper every day also fell, from 69 percent in 1972 to 62 per-
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