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A new civilization is emerging
  1. The photos on the previous page show three important stages in the development of human civilization. Try to decide which words or expressions go with the photos. Look up the terms that you don't know.
  2. Try to characterize each stage in detail using as many of the words and expressions as possible.

The Text:

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it. This new civilization brings with it new family styles, changed ways of working, loving, and living, a new economy, new political conflicts, and beyond all this an altered consciousness as well.

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognising it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.

Until now the human race has undergone two great waves of change, each one largely obliterating earlier cultures or civilizations and replacing them with ways of life inconceivable to those who came before. The First Wave of change - the agricultural revolution - took thousands of years to play itself out. The Second Wave - the rise of industrial civilization -took a mere three hundred years. Today history is even more accelerative, and it is likely that the Third Wave will sweep across history and complete itself in a few decades. Those of us who happen to share the planet at this explosive moment will therefore feel the full impact of the Third Wave in our own lifetimes.

The Third Wave brings with it a genuinely new way of life based on diversified, renewable energy sources; on methods of production that make most factory assembly lines obsolete; on new, non-nuclear families; on a novel institution that might be called the "electronic cottage"; and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future. The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization and centralization, beyond the 2,5 concentration of energy, money and power.

This new civilization has its own distinctive world outlook; its own ways of dealing with time, space, logic and causality. And, its own principles for the politics of the future.

Exploring the text:

  1. How do the authors characterize the new civilization that is emerging in our lives? Pick out the most important key words and try to explain what the authors had in mind.
  2. What do the authors mean when they say that "Humanity faces a quantum leap forward"?
  3. The authors use the terms "standardization, synchronization and centralization" to characterize our society (the second wave). Try to think of examples that might prove their point. (Where do we find a tendency to standardize and to synchronize things or people? ln which fields is there a trend towards centralization?)

Close-up: Vocabulary

Pick out words and expressions that refer to 'change' and 'development'. Then translate them into German.

A step further:

1. Choose one of the following features of the third wave and try to imagine how it might affect our everyday lives.

a) new family styles c) new methods of production  e) radically-changed schools
b) renewable energy sources  d) the electronic cottage  f) new codes of behaviour

2. Make a mind map of the third wave society, using key words from the text and "Before you read" as starting points. Then branch out as far as you can.