FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CIVILIZATION

Today, of course, the mass circulation newspaper and magazine are so standard a part of daily life in every one of the industrial nations that they are taken for granted. Yet the rise of these publications on a national level reflected the convergent development of many new industrial technologies and social forms. Thus, writes Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, they were made possible by the coming together of “trains to transport the publications throughout a [European-size] country in a single day; rotary presses capable of turning out dozens of millions of copies in several hours; a network of telegraph and telephones … above all a public taught to read by compulsory education, and industries needing to mass distribute their products.” ,

In the mass media, from newspapers and radio to movies and television, we find once again an embodiment of the basic principle of the factory. All of them stamp identical messages into millions of brains, just as the factory stamps out identical products for use in millions of homes. Standardized, mass-manufactured “facts,” counterparts of standardized, mass-manufactured products, flow from a few concentrated image-factories out to millions of consumers.Without this vast, powerful system for channeling information, industrial civilization could not have taken form or functioned reliably.

Thus there sprang up in all industrial societies, capitalist and socialist alike, an elaborate info-sphere—communication channels through which individual and mass messages could be distributed as efficiently as goods or raw materials. This info-sphere intertwined with and serviced the techno-sphere and the socio-sphere, helping to integrate economic production with private behavior.

Each of these spheres performed a key function in the larger system, and could not have existed without the others. The techno-sphere produced and allocated wealth; the socio-sphere, with its thousands of interrelated organizations, allocated roles to individuals in the system. And the info-sphere , allocated the information necessary to make the entire system work. Together they formed the basic architecture of society.

We see here in outline, therefore, the common structures of all Second Wave nations—regardless of their cultural or climatic differences, regardless of their ethnic and religious heritage, regardless of whether they call themselves capitalist or communist.