Future Shock author Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi Toffler, explained the "wave" theory to about 200 government librarians at a conference March 22 at the Library.
The futurist authors coined "wave" to refer to technological advances man has made over the ages.
Speaking at the annual forum of LC's Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC), Ms. Toffler described man as a beast of burden working the fields during the first-wave agrarian age, a cog in the wheel as he operated machinery during the second-wave industrial age, and a "neuron" in a third-wave information age in which linked computer databases are like a neural network.
The information age requires an increased specialization of knowledge, according to the Tofflers. "We are seeing changes in how knowledge is used and organized, and that is, of course, what libraries are all about," Mr. Toffler told about 250 librarians, information resource and records managers, archivists, and computer and telecommunications experts.
FLICC is an interagency committee of the Library of Congress established in 1965 as the Federal Library Committee to provide leadership in addressing policy issues that affect the flow of information to government employees and the public. FLICC arranges forums on federal information policy, which in the past decade have become an annual status report on information access and dissemination policies.
According to Mr. Toffler, computer networks make greater cross referencing necessary. With linked databases at their fingertips, researchers and scholars can fine- tune their search parameters, he said. "Deeper and deeper specialization becomes possible [because there are] more and more unfamiliar or novel juxtapositions of information."
Meanwhile, mass production of goods and materials is in decline as customization takes its place, said Mr. Toffler, who used the word "demassification" to describe the change.
According to Mr. Toffler, the industrial age began about 300 years ago in Western Europe, when an urban industrial civilization arose based on "mass production, mass consumption, mass media, mass education, mass entertainment, mass recreation and frequently the weapons of mass destruction."
Mr. Toffler dated the information age to 1956, the first year there were more white-collar workers than blue-collar laborers in the United States. Instead of producing more material faster, "the future form of production is continual individualization of the output," Mr. Toffler said. As examples, he cited niche marketing of mail-order catalogs according to ZIP code and buyer profile and the increase in the number of television channels and specialty shows.
Because the central factor in the information age is knowledge, the key is to have "the right knowledge in the right head at the right time and in the right place," Mr. Toffler said.
He drew a distinction between economies of the first and second waves and the third wave. The first and second waves used a zero-sum economic model, he said.
"If you own land and grow a crop on it, I cannot grow a crop on that land at the same time. It's [either] your rice paddy or it's my rice paddy. ... If you operate that assembly line, [then] I cannot. What about information and knowledge? You have the information, [but] I can have the same information. We can both use it," Mr. Toffler said. "That means we go from a zero-sum to a nonzero-sum set of concepts about economics."
The economic shift is "the biggest thing we've seen in 300 years," according to Mr. Toffler, who added it would result in a "truly revolutionary change in human experience."
The Tofflers drew at least one of their wave theories from personal experience. From 1950 to 1954, they worked in factories in the Midwest. Mr. Toffler was a machine repairman, while Ms. Toffler worked at an Ohio aluminum foundry. He went on to write Future Shock (Random House, 1970), and they recently cowrote Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave (Turner Publishing, 1995).
Mr. Toffler concluded by urging government librarians to form a "conscious constituency" with others who see the third wave "not just as a technological change [but as something that can] lift whole populations out of misery."
