THE THIRD WAVE
Second Wave people, yearning for the ready-to-wear moral and ideological certainties of the past, are annoyed and disoriented by the information blitz. They are nostalgic for radio programs of the 1930’s or movies of the 1940’s. They feel cut off from the new media environment, not merely because much of what they hear is threatening or upsetting, but because the very packages in which information arrives are unfamiliar.
Instead of receiving long, related “strings” of ideas, organized or synthesized for us, we are increasingly exposed to short, modular blips of information–ads, commands, theo-ries, shreds of news, truncated bits and blobs that refuse to fit neatly into our pre-existing mental files. The new imagery resists classification, partly because it often falls outside our old conceptual categories, but also because it comes in packages that are too oddly shaped, transient, and disconnected.Assailed by what they perceive as the bedlam of blip culture, Second Wave people feel a suppressed rage at the media.
Third Wave people, by contrast, are more at ease in the midst of this bombardment of blips—the ninety-second news-clip intercut with a thirty-second commercial, a fragment of song and lyric, a headline, a cartoon, a collage, a newsletter item, a computer printout. Insatiable readers of disposable paperbacks and special-interest magazines, they gulp huge amounts of information in short takes. But they also keep an eye out for those new concepts or metaphors that sum up or organize blips into larger wholes. Rather than trying to stuff the new modular data into the standard Second Wave catego-ries or frameworks, they learn to make their own, to form their own “strings” out of the blipped material shot at them by the new media.
Instead of merely receiving our mental model of reality, we are now compelled to invent it andcontinually reinvent it. This places an enormous burden onus. But it also leads toward greater individuality, a de-massification of personality as well as culture. Some of us crack under the new pressure or withdraw into apathy or anger. Others emerge as well formed, continually growing, competent individuals able to operate, as it were, on a higher level. (In either case, whether the strain proves too great or not, the result is a far cry from the uniform, standardized, easily regimented robots foreseen by so many sociologists and science fiction writers of the Second Wave era.)
Above all this, the de-massification of the civilization, which the media both reflects and intensifies, brings with it an
enormous jump in the amount of information we all exchange with one another. And it is this increase that explains why we are becoming an “information society.**
For the more diverse the civilization—the more differentiated its technology, energy forms and people—the more in-formation must flow between its constituent parts if the entirety is to hold together, particularly under the stress of high change. An organization, for example, must be able to predict (more or less) how other organizations will respond to change, if it is to plan its own moves sensibly. And the same goes for individuals. The more uniform we are, the less we need to know about each other in order to predict one another’s behavior. As the people around us grow more individ-ualized or de-massified, we need more information—signals and cues–to predict even roughly, how they are going to be-have toward us. And unless we can make such forecasts we cannot work or even live together.
As a result, people and organizations continually crave more information and the entire system begins to pulse with higher and higher flows of data. By forcing up the amount of information needed for the social system to cohere, and the speeds at which it must be exchanged, the Third Wave shat-ters the framework of the obsolete, overloaded Second Wave info-sphere and constructs a new one to take its place.
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