FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

THE THIRD WAVE

This shift of activity from the production sector to the pro-sumption sector also suggests the coming of another kind of : balance into people’s lives. Growing numbers of workers engaged in producing for the market spend their time dealing with abstractions—words, numbers, models—and people known only slightly, if at all.

For many, such “headwork” can be fascinating and rewarding. But it is often accompanied by the sense of being dissociated—cut off, as it were, from the down-to-earth sights, sounds, textures, and emotions of everyday existence. Indeed, much of today’s glorification of handcrafts, gardening, peasant or blue-collar fashions, and what might be called “truck-driver chic” may be a compensation for the rising tide of abstraction in the production sector.

By contrast, in presumption we usually deal with a more concrete, immediate reality—in firsthand contact with things and people. As more people divide their time, serving as part-time workers and part-time prosumers, they are in a position to enjoy the concrete along with the abstract, the complementary pleasures of both headwork and handwork. The prosumer ethic makes handwork respectable again, after 300 years of being looked down upon. And this new balance, too, is likely to influence the distribution of personality traits.

Similarly, we have seen that with the rise of industrialism, the spread of highly interdependent factory work encouraged men to become objective, while staying home and working at low-interdependency tasks promoted subjectivity among women. Today, as more women are drawn into jobs producing for the marketplace, they too are increasingly objec-tivized. They are encouraged to “think like a man.** Conversely, as more men stay home, undertaking a greater share of the housework, their need for “objectivity” is lessened. They are “subjectivized.”

Tomorrow, as many Third Wave people divide their lives between working part-time in big, interdependent companies or organizations and working part-time for self and family hi small autonomous, presuming units—we may well strike a new balance between objectivity and subjectivity in both sexes.

Instead of finding a “male” attitude and a “female” attitude, neither of them well-balanced, the system may reward people who are healthily able to see the world through both perspectives. Objective subjectivists—and vice versa.

 

 

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