"The Four Waves" that are Transforming Our Society

Self-Administered Test  (True or False -  25 Items)

Dr. Abe V. Rotor

The illiterate of the 21th century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,  Alvin Toffler

1. Alvin Toffler is an American writer and futurist (Future Shock, Eco-Spasm), known for his works discussing digital revolution, communications revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity.

2. Actually Alvin Toffler’s work is a joint undertaking with his wife – Heidi Toffler – also a writer and a futurist.

3. If there are three most influential voices among business leader, they are Alvin Toffler - after Bill Gates and John Rockefeller.

4. “Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest.” Says Bill Gates one of the richest man on earth. “Society needs all kinds of skill that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone.”

5. The first wave is the society characterized by hunting and gathering – a nomadic society transient and divided – which favored early humans to explore the world in their time. The Fertile Crescent which was later part of Babylon at the confluence of the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers was the first site ushering the beginning of the First Wave or the Agrarian Society.

6. The First Wave Society is characterized by the nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation.

7. The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass transit, mass entertainment, weapon of mass destruction, mass religion.

8. The Third Wave Society is a combination of mass movement and bandwagon with standardization, centralization, and synchronization, often ending up with bureaucracy.

9. Two predictions of the Third Wave by its advocates led by Toffler are paperless office and human cloning. We have already realized this no doubt, in spite of technological barriers and politico-religious conditions have imposed regulations and generated varying opinions and controversies.

10. Third Wave means a post-industrial society. It has generated keywords to unwind the complexity that characterize our society today, some of these are Super-Industrial Society, Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, Cyberspace, Technotronic Age. These include terms like e-Commerce, e-learning, e-mail, on-line teaching, global positioning, Google Earth, ATM, globalization, and the like.

11. The Third Wave Society is an aging society. It is found in highly industrialized countries where population is coming to a standstill, where longevity breeds octogenarians up to centenarians. There will be need of new medical technologies from self-diagnosis, self-administer therapies delivered by nanotechnology to do for themselves what doctors used to do. Robotics are no longer workers in industries; they are becoming domesticated.

12. “Prosumers” is a coined word – producer and consumer. It means we are eliminating much of the work of middlemen. We are linking production and consumption directly. Examples are freelance work, open source, assembly kit, instant house package, build your own car or plane. These belong to the second wave.

13. The Third Wave changes the concept of retirement (re-tire as good as new tire), child labor (kids are smarter, they can earn and make a living early), education (distance education, on-line, crash workshop), nationalism (citizen of the world, too); concepts of capitalism, socialism, nation-state, so with corporation, cooperatives, entrepreneurship, management, and the like.

14. The Third Wave Society is moving away from international organization to seek its own direction as intended by a particular society, thus undermining the UN and its organizations like FAO, WHO, WTO UNEP, WFO; APEC, EU, NATO, ASEAN, ANZUS, International Court of Justice, North American Union, and others.

15. The Fourth Wave Society is characterized by man's quest for expansion into outer space, possibly incorporating the rise of a second agricultural revolution in an off-world setting; it means reclamation of the desolate regions of the earth; it means creating a prototype superhuman through genetic engineering.

16. Jose Rizal in his essay, The Philippines a Century Hence, prophesied the Philippines as a progressive nation likened to the great nations of Europe.

17. Among the socialists that influenced China are Marx, Lenin, and Engels – who are all Germans.

18. Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus – evolutionist and futuristic, respectively, changed the world’s thinking regarding demography.

19. Michel Jordan and Yao Ming are towering giants in the NBA, first in NBA’s history to have regular Chinese player.

20. These artists changed China – Picasso for abstract art, Marilyn Monroe for feminism, Mother Teresa for religiosity; Julius Caesar for autocracy.

21. There are great men who became famous for their prophesies - Nostradamus and Malthus. One saw tomorrow, the other saw the four horsemen of Apocalypse.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.  Subsistence, increases only in an arithmetical ratio (as shown in this graph)  – Thomas Malthus

22. Philosophy – both ancient and modern – can be traced ultimately to Socrates, be it Platonian, or Aristotelian, and the philosophies of Emmanuel Kant, Marx, Thoreau, Sartre.

23. One man fought a nation, and save a nation, abhorring violence His only weapon: peaceful protest and civil disobedience in asceticism that swept the land, people revering him as father and almost god. His name is Gandhi.

24. It is no longer possible for us to return to the Second Wave, much less to the First Wave, and live a less stressful and more meaningful life, because time is irreversible, and epochs and eras have their own specific time - they are now part of history, and there is no turning back. Life is truly a one-way direction, reminiscent of the poem, "I pass this way but once."

25. Little do we know of the unknown great man, like the Unknown Soldier, yet he represents countless people whose deeds are also those of great men and women we revere today. They are us – each one of us.

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ANSWERS: 1T; 2T; 3F;Peter Drucker instead of John D Rockefeller, 4F;quotation from Alvin Toffler's; 5T; 6F; second wave or industrial society; 7T; 8F, still second wave; 9F have not been realized so far; 10T; 11T; 12T; 13T; 14F, the more international cooperation is needed; 15T; 16T; 17T; 18T; 19T; 20F, not among the 50 people listed by Time; 21T; 22T; 23T; 24F, we have the choice to live the kind of life we wish to follow - "I am the captain of my soul, I'm the master of my fate"; 25T.

RATING:
24-25 Outstanding
21-23 Very Good
18-20 Good
15-17 Fair
12-14 Passed

Read, read, read. Open avrotor.blogspot.com Living with Nature. There are about  3,800 posts to date. 

A personal reflection in these critical times.

Reflect on Thomas Gray’s Elegy on a Country Churchyard, specifically this stanza.

“Full many a gem of purest ray serene, 
       The deep unfathomed caves the oceans bear; 
Full many a many flower is born to blush unseen, 
       And waste their sweetness in the desert air.” 

This unknown great man did not die in vain, in the same way we should regard ourselves because we – all of us has the capacity to be great.  Bringing up our children to become good citizens, being a Samaritan on a lonely road, embracing a returning Prodigal Son, “plugging a hole in the dike like the boy who saved Holland from being engulfed by the sea,” or living life the best way we can that make other live the same – these and countless deeds make us great, and if in that little way we fall short of it, then each and everyone of us putting each small deeds together, make the greatest ever deed, for the greatest thing humans can do is collective goodness – the key to true unity and harmony. 

Dr. AV Rotor