THE THIRD WAVE
The result is less pressure to be “on time” and the spread of more casual attitudes toward time among the young. Punctuality, like morality, becomes situational.
In short, as the Third Wave moves in, challenging the old industrial way of doing things, it changes the relationship of the entire civilizationto time. The old mechanical synchronization that destroyed so much ofthe spontaneity and joy of life and virtually symbolized the Second Wave is on its way out. The young people who reject the nine-to-five regime, who are indifferent to classical punctuality, may not understand why they behave as they do. But time itself has changed in the “real world,” and along with it we have changed the ground rules that once governed us.
THE POST-STANDARDIZED MIND
The Third Wave does more than alter Second Wave patterns of synchronization. It attacks another basic feature of industrial life: standardization.
The hidden code of Second Wave society encouraged a steamroller standardization of many things—from values, weights, distances, sizes, time, and currencies to products and prices. Second Wave businessmen worked hard to make every widget identical, and some still do.
Today’s sawiest businessmen, as we have seen, know how to customize (as opposed to standardize) at lowest cost, and find ingenious ways of applying the latest technology to the individualization of products and services. In employment the numbers of workers doing identical work grows smaller and smaller as the variety of occupations increases. Wages and fringe benefits begin to vary more from worker to worker. Workers themselves become more different from one another, and since they (and we) are also consumers, the differences immediately translate into the marketplace.
The shift away from traditional mass production thus is accompanied by a parallel de-massification of marketing, merchandising, and of consumption. Consumers begin to make their choices not only because a product fulfills a specific material or psychological function but also because of the way it fits into the larger configuration of products and services they require. These highly individualized configurations are transient, as are the life-styles they help to define. Consumption, like production, becomes configurationaL Post-standardized production brings with it post-standardized consumption.
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