THE THIRD WAVE
Ai precisely the same moment, therefore, that we are radi-cally restructuring our social uses of time—by introducing flextime on the job, by decoupling workers from the mechanical conveyor, and in the other ways described in Chapter Nineteen—we are also fundamentally reformulating our theoretical images of time. And while these theoretical discoveries seem at the moment to have no practical application to daily life, the same was true of those seemingly speculative chalk marks on the blackboard—the formulas that led ultimately to the smashing of the atom.
SPACE TRAVELERS
Many of these changes in our conception of time also blast holes in our theoretical understanding of space, since the two are tightly interwoven. But we are altering our image of space in more immediate ways as well.
We are changing the actual spaces in which all of us live, work, and play. How we get to work, how far and how frequently we travel, where we live—all these influence our experience of space. And all these are changing. In fact, as the Third Wave arrives we enter a new phase in humanity’s relationship to space.
The First Wave, which spread agriculture around the world, brought with it, as we saw earlier, permanent farming settlements in which most people lived out their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace. Agriculture introduced a stay-put, spatially intensive existence, and fostered intensely local feelings—the village mentality.
Second Wave civilization, by contrast, concentrated huge populations in great cities and, because it needed to draw resources from afar and to distribute goods at a distance, it bred mobile people. The culture it produced was spatially extensive and city- or nation- rather than village-centered.
The Third Wave alters our spatial experience by dispersing rather than concentrating population. While millions of people continue to pour into urban areas in the still-industrializing parts of the world, all the high- technology countries are already experiencing a reversal of this flow.Tokyo, London, Zurich, Glasgow, and dozens of other major cities are all losing population while middle-sized or smaller cities are showing gains.
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