脑力劳动者教程教案.pptVIP

Unit 10Things: The Throw-Away Society School of Foreign Studies, SCNU 2009.11. First Wave is the society after agrarian revolution and replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures. The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation. Toffler writes: The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy. Third Wave is the post-industrial society. Toffler would also add that since late 1950s most countries are moving away from a Second Wave Society into what he would call a Third Wave Society. He coined lots of words to describe it and mentions names invented by other people, like the Information Age. In this post-industrial society, there is a lot of diversity in lifestyles (“sub-cults”). Adhocracies (fluid organizations) adapt quickly to changes. Information can substitute most of the material resources and becomes the main material for workers (cognitarians 脑力劳动者 instead of proletarians工人阶级), who are loosely affiliated. Mass customization offers the possibility of cheap, personalized, production catering to small niches. The gap between producer and consumer is bridged by technology using a so called configuration system. Prosumers can fill their own needs. Since the 1970s, people have been trying to make sense out of the impact of new technologies and social change. Tofflers writings have been influential beyond the confines (the areas) of scientific, economic and public policy discussions. Techno music pioneer Juan Atkins cites Tofflers phrase techno rebels in Future Shock as inspiring him to use the word techno to describe the musical style he helped to create. Tofflers works and ide