Customer Reviews

The Third Wave

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I decided to reread this book after 20 years to see how accurately it represented the experiences of the past 20 years. How nice a surprise I received when I found that the broad themes were beautifully portrayed against the background of the prior agricultural and industrial economies. This long term perspective made the articulation of the future vision clearer.

Particularly impressive in retrospect is the description of a forecast for mass customized products. The customer "will become so integrated into the production process that we find it . . . difficult to tell . . . who is the producer." One might be reading about someone ordering a computer on the Dell Web site.

Almost equally impressive is the appreciation of how electronic connections will establish horizontal connections. "Even a partial shift towards the electronic office will be enough to trigger an eruption of social, psychological, and economic consequences." "It promises to restructure all human relationships and roles in the office as well."

Key insights related to:

(1) Companies needing to take on full responsibility for the consequences of their actions on society and the environment;

(2) Companies becoming much more important social institutions of change;

(3) Information moving to the center of major decisions;

(4) Government spreading its influence so that business and politics become inextricably entwined; and

(5) Institutional ethics coming to more closely reflect social ethics.

In fact, this is the first book I have located that sees the business organization as the critical institution in making ecological, moral, political, racial, sexual and social change, as well as the usual transactional ones.

The fundamental vision of humanity as seeking a more appropriate civilization that is built around individual choice in coordinating social interests is a remarkably accurate description of the evolution of the free market democracies over the last 20 years.

Realizing how hard it is to forecast anything, one comes away with a remarkable appreciation for Alvin Toffler's fundamental estimation of human potential. He took that understanding, tied technology to it, and found the answer quite well.

After enjoying this remarkable book (for the first time or) again, I encourage you to consider how these same human characteristics will take us forward in the future. How can you facilitate this felicitous development?

Make your actions and those you cooperate in serve everyone's best interests!

This book attempts to explain the both the nature and the process of the technological revolution that has transformed the world's social and economic systems. To quote Newt Gingrich, US Speaker of the House of Representatives, "Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given us the key to viewing current disarray within the positive framework of a dynamic, exciting future... The Tofflers correctly understand the development and distribution of information that has become the central productivity and power activity of the human race.... In the Third Wave, the Tofflers moved from observation (found in earlier works such as Future Shock) to creating a predictive framework They placed the information revolution (from circa 1990) in an historical perspective, comparing it with the other two great transformations, the agricultural revolution (beginning 8000 B.C thru around 1700) the industrial revolution (beginning around 1700 and still spreading across world society in an ever slower movement) . According to the Tofflers, we are feeling the impact of the third great wave of change in history, and we are, as a result, in the process of creating a new civilization." (Preface to Toffler's Creating a New Civilization)

It is the collision of these concentric waves, and the turbulence created by the interaction of these waves, ie the resistance of industrial-based organizations to information-based systems, that accounts, in their view, for much of the seeming social, political and economic disorder. In short, this book seeks to postulate a paradigm that explains the entire scope of the Information Revolution. It succeeds in this goal as perhaps no other book written to date. For this reviewer, The Third Wave is as thought- provoking as we approach the year 2000 as the book The Greening of America was in the 1970s.

In the first wave, power came from violence or force. In the second, the Industrial Revolution, power came from wealth. Today, it comes from knowledge. The battle for the future is going to be over information. Unfortunately, the book takes 500 pages to say that.

Toffler's other books are stronger and if short on time, can be read in exchange for The Third Wave. However Alvin does write a particularly touching foreword about his wife who has been his long time writing partner.

Perhaps the reason that Alvin Toffler's classic book feels so relevant some 25 years after its initial publication is the fact that he wrote it in a time which, in retrospect, was not so different from our own: The world was trembling before the threat of terrorism embodied, in Toffler's age, by Iranian terrorists, and radical new technologies, in the form of powerful and increasingly affordable computers, were drastically altering business and society. But probably, the book resonates simply because he was right about almost everything. For that reason, we from getAbstract recommend this book as a basic requirement for any professional.

The book was published in the the early 1980's. The situations and examples given by Toffoler , though excellent, cannot be well appreciated by us as they seem out of palce in current times. However we must give Tofler his due for his predictions of the future. Even back in the 1980's ,when he wrote the book, he has rightly predicted the break up the USSR and emergence of the 'EURO'. I would'nt recommend this book as a "must read", but anyone with a literary interest and the patience must invest in this book.

In my view, the best of the original "trilogy" (to which a fourth book was eventually added). This book changed the way I experienced and understood history - it put human development into context in a way which was never properly elucidated to me before.

In essence, Toffler shows how society and economy have moved from hunter-gatherers to the industrial age, and then to the knowledge/information based economies of the world we currently live in.

The details and depth of research in this book are staggering. And, for basically a very long research paper, his style is exciting and engaging, pulling the reader through the statistics and historical events shaping his overall thesis.

As cheesy as it sounds, when I read this book in 1992, it changed my life; it ignited a new appreciation and fascination with history to the point where I now seek it out.

When I started this book, I could not put it down before I finished it. For a month after that, I could not think of anything else but what I have read, and for the next twenty years I had countless occasions to see that the book was profoundly right. The book was written for a lay reader, simple and fun to read, and yet, I am sure that it will be seen as one of the most influential science books of the 20th century. History and sociology have two periods: before and after The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.

Even though this book was written in '80, a large amount of it still stands up. An important work for us as a society to think about family, work, government and socialization in new ways as we approach the next wave of societal evolution.

Even after 20 years have passed. What stands out most in reading it again is how so many of the changes we are going through were foretold and yet human beings seem to have no will to prepare for the future. Better leaders might have made the changes more tolerable but people would probably rejected leadership that did the hard things to make the transitions easier.

There is hope in this book in spite of it all and it remains very important reading.

All of Alvin Toffler's books yield really useful insights and are well worth your time.
I have read every one in the series including revolutionary wealth and this book "The Third Wave".
No matter what you do for a living or who you are you will benefit from enhancing your world view and your grasp of reality by reading this.
I think there is no doubt that the forward looking aspects of these books are really firmly grounded in the truth.