Paul Virlio’s seminal text from 1994. Deals with concepts of vision, speed and technology. (48 pages)

Download PDF (634k).

PDF of Alvin Toffler’s seminal book (268 pages)
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A survey by Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile) suggests that many teens and their parents across the U.S. would rather vote by text message on their cell phones in the next election rather than go to the polls.

BYE-BYE POLLS

• More than six in ten (61%^a) of respondents of legal voting age, age 18 and older, would be open to voting by text.
• Eight in ten (80%) teens, ages 13-17, say that if they were allowed to vote in this year’s Presidential election, they’d do it by text message instead of going to the polls.

BIPARTISAN SUPPORT

• More than half of all Democrats, Republicans and Independents surveyed say that if allowed, they’d text in their Presidential vote.

The survey, commissioned by Samsung Mobile, was conducted by Kelton Research and included 300 American teens ages 13 – 19 and 500 American parents with children ages 13 – 19.

^a All decimals are rounded to the nearest percentage point. This may result in certain numerical totals adding up to slightly more or slightly less than 100%.

Via Businesswire

The history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques. Background knowledge has enabled people to create new things, and conversely, many scientific endeavors have become possible through technologies which assist humans to travel to places we could not otherwise go, and probe the nature of the universe in more detail than our natural senses allow

First Wave is the society after agrarian revolution and replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures

Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 1600s through the mid-1900s).
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 him (super-industrial society) and other people (like the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, technetronic age, scientific-technological revolution), which to various degrees predicted demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change (one of Toffler’s key maxims is “change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways”).