Three waves of Alvin Toffler. The basic points

«Executive elite» is the people who are surfing on the edge of the Second Wave that came with the Industrialism. Those are the people who really rule and have the power. They make corrections to the laws through their representatives in parliament or through their people in the headquarters of the communist party, they settle and stop wars, they are in control of destiny of the whole peoples in the industrial age.

Anyway, we should admit that industrial era made our lives much more exiting. People got an incredible number of opportunities they couldn’t dream of during the agricultural age. We can travel anywhere in the world within reasonable amount of time; telephone also made communication between people much easier; the achievements in medicine helped us to get rid to many of fatal diseases and have greatly extended the human life, mass-media made the distribution of information much easier too. Nevertheless, the industrial era kind of human beings were still used only as a tool for achieving certain aims. It was still not considered to be a primary link in the chain of the human existence.

Third Wave

The chapter where the author asks more questions that provides answers. Alvin gives the reader the right to decide which answers will most likely fit the system. Anyone who can answer them will probably be able to obtain a clear picture of what is going to happen to us in the near future.

In this chapter I found the most places where I want to argue with the author. It was not surprising for me because this part of the book was meant to describe the future structure of the society. Like I mentioned before, I have been wondering, what would be different in this book if it were written now, not twenty years ago. On the other hand, even now we still do not have enough experience to decide whether Toffler’s theory is right.

The need for a new kind of energy and further discovering of irreplaceable fossil fuels was the reason of shifting into the second wave. But as we all know, the reserves of fossil fuels are not endless on the Earth and moreover, with the current consumption rate we are going to have them for a hundred more years. All this plus the increasing need for more powerful energy have created the potential situation for transferring into the next era or «The Third Wave» ." In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries suddenly stepped out of the shadows. Choking off the world’s supply of crude oil, it sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shuddering downspin" (131).

I found the author’s opinion about the nuclear energy power surprising. He considers both nuclear energy and the fossil fuels to be obsolete, and he is looking for something else in terms of new era’s energy. «In short, though nuclear reactors or coal gasification or liquefaction plants and other such technologies may seem to be advanced or futuristic and therefore progressive, they are, in fact, artefacts of a Second Wave past caught in its own deadly contradictions» (138).

In my opinion, deriving energy from nuclear fuel cannot be called obsolete. On the contrary, this kind of energy is only at the very first stage of being used by humans. There are still lots of problems like the poor safety of nuclear reactors or technical impossibility to create a compact nuclear engine at the current stage, but we should not forget, that the efficiency of the steam engine was also very poor and comprised less than 5%!

Of course, new sources of energy will be discovered by human beings in future, but today the use of nuclear energy is very advanced. I think that this the Third Wave civilisation kind of energy. Moreover, I tend to think that the beginning of the new era should be considered in connection with the discovery of nuclear power rather than with the potential exhaustion of fossil fuels.