Blip Reading

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE THIRD WAVE by Alvin Toffler Morrow; 544 pages; $14.95

How the future flies. Ten years have already passed since Alvin Toffler published his bestselling Future Shock and emerged as the world's best-known manipulator of the fast-forward. Traveling the globe, lecturing businessmen and collecting the fuzz that grows on the inside of think tanks, Toffler became an orbiting Walter Winchell. Bulletins from the leading edge beamed down on Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. The effect could be stimulating but, too often, Toffler's redundant delivery and overheated prose turned kernels of truth into puffed generalities.

The same formula should ensure a wide, expectant audience for The Third Wave. Readers who can sort out the scattered facts and insights from such amalgams as "indust-reality" and "indi-video" will learn a few things. Discrimination may not be necessary, for as Toffler McLuhanizes, "Third Wave people . . . are more at ease in the midst of this bombardment of blips . . . But they also keep an eye out for those new concepts or metaphors that sum up or organize blips into larger wholes."

Toffler deals in what he might call meta-cepts. He divides history into three waves: the agricultural, the industrial and a rising Third Wave, driven by computer technology that threatens to transform the way most of the world lives and thinks. It is a world of "info-spheres," "techno-spheres," "biospheres" and "psycho-spheres." A Third Wave society would be "de-massified" by computer-controlled factories that retool easily and make standardization obsolete. The traditional financial ties between producers and consumers would be altered to create "prosumers" who could make and maintain goods for their own use.

Toffler's postindustrial preview also contains "electronic cottages," homes equipped with computer terminals, two-way TV and assorted hot lines. Citizens may not have to leave the house to conduct business, shop or even vote. In such an age of bread and circuitry there is no telling how powerful one might become. Says Toffler solemnly: "One can imagine a stage at which even ordinary television becomes interactive, so that instead of merely watching some Archie Bunker or Mary Tyler Moore of the future, we are actually able to talk to them and influence their behavior in the show." One can hardly wait.

Toffler is a man of many styles and voices. Much of his book reads as if it were hastily dictated in airline terminals and then punched into a word processor. Exclamations like "versatility is 'in' " could have been inspired by a Paris fashion show. He can sound as grim as Charlton Heston in a disaster film or as upbeat as a born-again Christian, or, as diversified Third Wavers might prefer, a Zen Baptist. There are also some hot-tub exhortations: "As Third Wave civilization matures, we shall create not a Utopian man or woman who towers over the people of the past, not a superhuman race of Goethes and Aristotles (or Genghis Khans or Hitlers) but merely, and proudly, one hopes, a race--and a civilization--that deserves to be called human."

One of Toffler's most annoying habits is to hedge his metaphors, qualify his hyperbole and then shamelessly launch into a new round of hype. Blowing hot and cold is not a bad way to confuse a reader and numb his critical sense. Yet certain questions about The Third Wave must surface. How, for example, can U.S. industrialism be on its last legs when foreign investment continues to pour in to build new manufacturing plants? And how can the prosumer, that glorified do-it-yourselfer, disrupt the cash nexus when he has to buy tools, spare parts and maintenance manuals?

In 1975 Toffler published a paperback called The Eco-Spasm Report that succinctly presented much the same thesis as The Third Wave. In his earlier work, the phenomenon was called "super-industrialism," not quite the catch phrase for the '80s. Eco-Spasm remains the better value. It clearly and calmly explained how oil shortages, Eurodollars and petrodollars and multinational corporations would change the rules of economics. At 116 pages, the slim book exemplified an energy-efficient future where less is more.

By contrast, The Third Wave is a 544-page pulp guzzler, definitely a throwback to the Second Wave.

--R.Z. Sheppard

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