DECODING THE NEW RULES
have taken root, that service workers far outnumber manufacturing workers, that flextime has begun to spread, that part-time and night work are prevalent, and that all-night services—superettes, banks, gas stations, and restaurants— will not be far behind.
The shift toward more flexible and personalized schedules also reduces energy costs and pollution by leveling out peak loads. Electric utilities in a dozen states are now using “time-of-day” pricing for industrial and residential customers to discourage energy use during traditional peak hours, while Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection has urged companies to institute flextime as a means of complying with federal environmental requirements.
These are among the most obvious implications of the time shift As the process continues to unfold in the years and decades ahead, we will see far more powerful and as yet unimag-ined consequences. The new time patterns will affect our daily rhythms in the home. They will affect our art. They will affect our biology. For when we touch on time we touch on all of human experience.
COMPUTERS AND MARIJUANA
These Third Wave rhythms spring from deep psychological, economic, and technological forces. At one level they arise from the changed nature of the population. People today—more affluent and educated than their parents and faced with more life choices—simply refuse to be massified. The more people differ in terms of the work they do or the products “they consume, the more they demand to be treated as individuals—and the more they resist socially imposed schedules.
But at another level the new, more personalized Third Wave rhythms can be traced to a wide range of new technologies moving into our lives. Video cassettes and home video recording, for example, make it possible for televiewers to tape programs off the air and view them at times of their own choosing. Writes columnist Steven Brill, “Within the next two or three years television will probably stop dictating the schedules of even the worst tube addicts.” The power of the great networks—the NBCs, the BBCs or NHKs—to synchronize viewing is coming to an end.
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