Alvin Toffler (born October 4, 1928) is an American writer known for ideas of what society is supposed to look like according to his theory of societal transformation following technological trends.
Toffler is a former associate editor of Fortune, a business-oriented magazine. His early works centered around the idea of information overload as a threat to mankind, eventually moving on to the impact that latter-day hardware, new technologies and capitalism have on society. Toffler used to advocate that a functioning society needs people with all sorts of skills, ranging from logic-cognitive to emotional skills, the latter which is needed for proper caring caring of people. According to his writings, the new education is concerned about teaching critical thinking, problem solving and self-teaching.
He describes societies according to civilisational waves following a 3-tier criteria:
First Wave describes the society of hunter-gatherers and agricultural landowners up until the Industrial Revolution.
Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 17th century through the mid-20th century). The main emphasis of the second wave is the massification of goods, sweeping everything consummable from education to media and entertainment.
Third Wave is the post-industrial society, which took a steep turn in the late 1950s. The Third Wave places knowledge as a primary resource, a definition which dovetails into other writers' ideas such as the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village etc leading to knowledge-based production and rounding off with the fast-paced technological innovations that we have today.
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