THE THIRD WAVE
mand a renewable and less centralized energy system. They want to legitimate options to the nuclear family. They fight for less standardization, more individualization in the schools. They place a high priority on environmental problems. They recognize the necessity to restructure the world economy on a more balanced and just basis.
Above all, while the Second Wave defenders play the conventional political game, Third Wave people are suspicious qf all political candidates and parties (even new ones), and sense that decisions crucial to our survival cannot be made within the present political framework.
The Second Wave camp still includes a majority of the nominal power-holders in our society—politicians, businessmen, union leaders, educators, the heads of the mass media—although many of them are deeply troubled by the inadequacies of the Second Wave world view. Numerically, the Second Wave camp undoubtedly still claims the unthinking support of most ordinary citizens as well, despite fast- spreading pessimism and disillusionment in their ranks.
The advocates of the Third Wave are more difficult to characterize. Some head up major corporations while others are zealous anticorporate consumerists. Some are worried environmentalists; others are more concerned with the issues oi sexual roles, family life, or personal growth. Some focus almost exclusively on the development of alternative energy-forms; others are mainly excited by the democratic promis of the communications revolution.
Some are drawn from the Second Wave “right,” others from the Second Wave “left”—free marketeers and libertarKf ans, neo-socialists, feminists, and civil rights activists, former flower children and the straightest of straight-arrows. Some’ are long-time activists in the peace movement; others have never marched or demonstrated for anything in their lives. Some are devoutly religious, others diehard atheists.
Scholars may debate at length over whether or not so seemingly formless a group constitutes a “class,” or whether, if so, it is the “new class” of educated information-workers, tellectuals, and technicians. Surely many of those in the Third Wave camp are college-educated, middle-class people. Surely many are directly engaged in the production and dissemi-j nation of information, or in the services, and, by twisting the term, one could probably call them a. class. Yet to do so obscures more than it reveals.
For among the key groups pressing toward the de-massifi-cation of industrial society are relatively uneducated ethnic minorities, many of whose members hardly fit the picture of the attache-case- carrying knowledge-worker.
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