FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE THIRD WAVE

market, educators designed standardized curricula. Men like Binet and Terman devised standardized intelligence tests. School grading policies, admission procedures, and accreditation rules were similarly standardized. The multiple-choice test came into its own.

The mass media, meanwhile, disseminated standardizing imagery, so that millions read the same advertisements, the same news, the same short stories. The repression of minority languages by central governments, combined with the influence of mass communications, led to the near disappearance of local and regional dialects or even whole languages, such as Welsh and Alsatian. “Standard” American, English, French, or, for that matter, Russian, supplanted “nonstan-dard” languages. Different parts of the country began to look alike, as identical gas stations, billboards, and houses cropped up everywhere. The principle of standardization ran through every aspect of daily life.

At an even deeper level, industrial civilization needed standardized weights and measures. It is no accident that one of the first acts of the French Revolution, which ushered the age of industrialism into France, was an attempt to replace the crazy-quilt patchwork of measuring units, common in preindustrial Europe, with the metric system and a new calendar. Uniform measures were spread through much of the world by the Second Wave.

Moreover, if mass production required the standardization of machines, products, and processes, the ever-expanding market demanded a corresponding standardization of money, and even prices. Historically, money had been issued by banks and private individuals as well as by kings. Even as late as the nineteenth century privately minted money was still in use in parts of the United States, and the practice lasted until 1935 hi Canada. Gradually, however, industrializing nations suppressed all nongovernmental currencies and managed to impose a single standard currency in their place.

Until the nineteenth century, moreover, it was still common for buyers and sellers hi industrial countries to haggle over every sale in the time- honored fashion of a Cairo bazaar. In 1825 a young Northern Irish immigrant named A. T. Stewart arrived in New York, opened a dry- goods store, and shocked customers and competitors alike by introducing a fixed price for every item. This one-price policy—price standardization—made Stewart one of the merchant princes of his era and cleared away one of the key obstacles to the development of mass distribution.