The net effect is to carry us away from the Huxleyan or Orwellian society of faceless, de-individualized humanoids that a simple extension of Second Wave tendencies would suggest and, instead, toward a profusion of life-styles and more highly individualized personalities. We are watching the rise of a “post- standardized mind” and a “post-standardized public.”
This will bring its own social, psychological, and philosophical problems, some of which we are already feeling in the loneliness and social isolation around us, but these are dramatically different from the problems of mass conformity that exercised us during the industrial age.
Because the Third Wave is not yet dominant even in the most technically advanced nations, we continue to feel the tug of powerful Second Wave currents. We are still completing some of the unfinished business of the Second Wave. For example, hard-cover book publishing in the United States, long a backward industry, is only now reaching the stage of mass-merchandising that paperback publishing and most other consumer industries attained more than a generation ago. Other Second Wave movements seem almost quixotic, like the one that urges us at this late stage to adopt the metric system in the United States to bring American measurements into conformity with those used in Europe. Still others derive from bureaucratic empire building, like the effort of Common Market technocrats in Brussels to “harmonise” everything from auto mirrors to college diplomas— “harmonisa-tion” being the current gobbledygook for industrial-style standardization.
Finally, there are movements aimed at literally turning back the clock— like the back-to-basics movement in United States schools.Legitimately outraged by the disaster in mass education, it does notrecognize that a de-massified society calls for new educational strategies, but seeks instead to restore and enforce Second Wave uniformity in the schools.
Nevertheless, all these attempts to achieve uniformity are essentially the rearguard actions of a spent civilization. The thrust of Third Wave change is toward increased diversity, not toward the further standardization of life. And this is just as true of ideas, political convictions, sexual proclivities, educational methods, eating habits, religious views, ethnic attitudes, musical taste, fashions, and family forms as it is of automated production.
An historic turning point has been reached, and standard-ization, another of the ruling principles of Second Wave civilization, is being replaced.
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