The first wave was the rise of agriculture, beginning arbitrarily around 8000 B.C.. Before this time, from the beginning of civilization, humans were hunter-gatherers, living in small, often migratory groups, feeding themselves by foraging, hunting, fishing, herding. Pre-first wave populations could be called "primitive," while second wave could be called civilized.

The first wave, then was a process of civilization. Land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure, politics. Life was organized around a village. A simple division of labor prevailed; a few clearly defined castes and classes arose. Power was rigidly authoritarian. Birth determined one’s position in life. The economy in each town was decentralized, so each community produced most of its own necessities.

The agricultural revolution, the first wave, was almost exhausted by the end of the seventeenth century, when the industrial revolution began in Europe, specifically England around 1650 to 1750. "Industrialization was more than smokestacks and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touched every aspect of human life; it put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen…It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box.

It is interesting to note the clash of civilizations between second and third wave In the settlement of the United States. The first settlers established an agricultural civilization. But hard on the heels of the farmers came the earliest industrializers, pushing the farms further west.

Economic and social tensions between First Wave and Second Wave forces grew in intensity until 1861, when they broke into armed violence. The Civil War "ws not fought exclusively…over the moral issue of slavery or such narrow economic issues as tariffs. It was fought over a much larger question: would the rich new continent be ruled by farmers or industrializers….?

Today the First Wave has virtually subsided, except in some first-world countries and tribal populations in Africa and South America.

The Second Wave continues to spread in second-world countries, as they build mills, plants, factories, railroads. The force of the Second Wave is not yet spent.

Effects/Facets of the Second Wave:

energy

First wave – "living batteries" – human and animal muscle power

second wave – irreplaceable fossil fuels

third wave -

Technology

first wave – "necessary inventions" – winches, wedges, catapults, levers, hoists

second wave – electromechanical machines, moving parts, belts, hoses, bearings, bolts – machine tools for mass production

            third wave – computer

Distribution/Production/Transportation

First wave – handcraft methods of production, custom products, small markets, slow distribution/transportation

Second wave – rail/highways, complex mass distribution networks, mass production

Third wave –

Families

First wave – large, multigenerational families, immobile (rooted to the soil)

                            Family as economic unit of production

Second wave – nuclear family, smaller, more mobile, more fragmented

Third wave –

Education

First wave – home schooling, small schools, less education needed/sought

Second wave – mass education; overt curriculum – 3 R’s; covert curriculum—obedience, rote, repetition; regimentation (factory work required these); children started school younger, stayed longer

Third wave – individualized, distributed (online learning)

Business

First wave – individuals "sole proprietors" – no real business form

Second wave – huge corporations, "immortal beings" –

Third wave?

"The nuclear family, the factory-style school, and the giant corporation, became the defining social institutions of Second Wave societies" (p. 30).

"In one Second Wave country after another, social inventors, believing the factory to be the most advanced and efficient agency for production, tried to embody its principles in other organizations as well. Schools, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, and other organizations thus took on many of the characteristics of the factory—its division of labor, its hierarchical structure, and its metallic impersonality." (p. 31)

Communication

First wave – face to face, person to person – means of sending messages across time/space limited, reserved for rich and powerful, under social control, weapons of the elite

Second wave – massive amounts of information now needed – postal services "the right arm of our modern civilization" / internal communications within companies also spiraled //

Telephone and telegraph

Mass society required mass communications (one sender, many receivers/technology) – newspapers, magazines, television, radio, -- "all of them stamp identical messages into millions of brains" / "facts" (mass-manufactured)

The invisible wedge:

The Second Wave…violently split apart two aspects of our lives that had always, until then, been one, driving a giant invisible wedge into our economy, our psyches, and even our sexual selves.

The Industrial Revolution, although it created a new social system, also ripped apart the underlying unity of society, creating …economic tension, social conflict, and psychological malaise.

The two halves of human life that the Second Wave split apart were production and consumption. Until the IR, the vast bulk of all foods, goods, services, were consumed by the producers themselves, their families, or a tiny elite….

In most agricultural societies the great majority of people were peasants in small, semi-isolated communities….who …lacked the incentive to increase production (beyond their own immediate needs). The small amount of commerce that existed represented only a trace element in history, compared with the extent of production for immediate self-use.

In First Wave economy, Sector A (production for own use) of society was huge; Sector B (production for trade) was tiny. So, for most people, production and consumption were fused into a single life-giving function.

The Second Wave violently changed this situation. Instead of essentially self-sufficient people and communities, it crated a situation in which the overwhelming bulk of all food, goods, and services was destined for sale, barter, or exchange. It virtually wiped out of existence goods produced for one’s own consumption; everyone became almost totally dependent upon food, goods, or services produced by somebody else.

In short, industrialism broke the union of production and consumption, and split the producer from the consumer.

Consequences:

"The marketplace" became the center of life; the economy became "marketized".

In politics, Second Wave governments were torn by conflict between the demands of producers (workers and managers) for higher wages, profits, benefits; and the demands of consumers (including these very same people) for lower prices.

What are the implications of this conflict today?

Culture too was shaped by this cleavage, producing the most money-minded, grasping commercialized, and calculating civilization in history. Personal relationships, family bonds, love, friendship, neighborly and community ties all became tinctured or corrupted by commercial self-interest.

This concern with money, goods, and things is not a reflection of capitalism (as Marx claimed) but of industrialism. It is a reflection of the central role of the marketplace in all societies in which production is divorced from consumption, in which everyone is dependent upon the marketplace rather than on his or her own productive skills for the necessities of life.

Toffler asserts that "corruption is inherent in the divorce of production from consumption."

This divorce of production from consumption even affected our psyches and our assumptions about personality. Behavior came to be seen as a set of transactions. Instead of a society based on friendship, kinship, or tribal or feudal allegiance, there arose …a civilization based on contractual ties (consider pre-nups!)

The dual personality of producer/consumer…

The person who, as a producer, was taught to defer gratification, be disciplined, controlled, restrained, obedient, a team player…was simultaneously taught , as consumer, to seek instant gratification, to be hedonistic, to abandon discipline, to pursue individualistic pleasure.

Sexual split --- between men as "objective" in orientation, and women as "subjective" –

In First Wave societies. Most work was performed in fields or at home, with the entire household working together and with most production destined for consumption within the village or manor. Work life and home life were fused, intermingled; division of labor was very primitive, with low levels of interdependency.

The Second Wave shifted work to factory, introducing a much higher level of interdependence—collective effort, division of labor, coordination, integration of many different skills. Success depended upon the carefully scheduled cooperative behavior of thousands of far-flung people, many of whom never laid eyes on one another. This also brought severe conflict over roles, responsibilities, rewards.

More and more production was transferred to factory and office; the countryside was striped of population.

But in the home, there was still interdependence. Each home remained a decentralized unit engaged in biological reproduction, child-rearing, cultural transmission. The housewife continued to "produce" but only for Sector A (her own family). As the husband marched off to do the direct economic work, the wife generally stayed behind to do the indirect economic work. He moved, as it were, into the future; she remained in the past.

This division produced a split in personality and inner life. The public nature of factory/office brought with it an emphasis on objective analysis and objective relationships. Men were encouraged to become "objective". Women performed in social isolation and were taught to be "subjective" (incapable of rational, analytic thought that supposedly went with objectivity). Women leaving home to work were accused of being "defeminized" tough, cold – (objective!)

Sexual differences and sex role stereotypes were sharpened by the misleading identification of men with production and women with consumption, even though men also consumed and women produced.

Once the invisible wedge between production and consumption was hammered into place, separating producer from consumer, profound changes followed:

Market needed to connect the two;

New political, social conflicts

New sexual roles

The split also meant that all Second Wave societies would have to operate in similar fashion, meeting certain basic requirements.

The code:

1. Standardization – millions of identical products; weights and measures; prices; money, language, technology….. what else?

   2.  Specialization – elimination of diversity in language, leisure, life-style ; diversity of work – only one task per person "professional"

   3.  Synchronization - careful organization of work; coordination of efforts; beat of the machine not of nature; punctuality; hours/days/weeks set aside for specific activities; school year

   4,  Concentration - total dependent on highly concentrated deposits of fossil fuel; population; work (in specific locations, rather than everywhere); the poor, criminals, the insane; concentration of flow of capital (to large corporations, banks); concentration of production among only a few large producers (autos, breakfast foods)

   5.  Maximization – bigger is better; smaller number of larger units; growth at all costs (GNP, etc.)

   6.  Centralization – of political power (U.S. states consolidated); of industry (companies, industries, economy as a whole)