The Fourth Wave - A change coming for 10,000 years.

In the 1980’s I picked up a book about societal changes called Megatrends by John Nesbitt. This was a real eye opener for me and for my students. I used it to teach computer science classes at the University where I live. One of his major premises was that society has gone through three major changes in its entire 10,000 year history:

1. Hunting and Gathering Society – tribal way of life, thousands of years
   
2. Agricultural Society – People began to plant, cultivate and herd animals. Society changed and this lasted for a several thousand years.
   
3. Manufacturing Society - In the 1600’s through the 1950’s, society learned how to manufacture products, created machines and factories. This gave rise to the first major cities and for several hundred years, society evolved.
   

Information Society – from the 1950’s until today, information workers began producing something of value that is still changing society. Information became the true power in the world and information workers have replaced manufacturing workers in numbers since the mid-80’s.

It’s a wonderful book even today. We are still in an information society. We are now however entering the Fourth Wave of his major trend. This new trend is the subject of this blog and somewhat where I will take exception with Nicholas Carr. Cloud Computing is a byproduct of the major trend in society today. It is a trend that has just started and will last for 16 years.

16 years?

Starting in 2008 and lasting until 2024, the process of connecting the physical world with the digital world will forever change the way we connect to technology, receive information and connect to each other. Let me explain.

In computing, there have been three major revolutions:

1. Mainframe computers in the 1950’s and 60’s
2. PC’s in the late 70’s and 80’s
3. The Internet in the 90’s

Each of these revolutions impacted not just computing, but society in general. There is not a person, nor a business that did not feel the impact. Even if they never touched a computer everything around people changed. So in a way, although these were brought about by chips and computers, they were really about society accepting these changes and making them a part of their everyday life.

According to Forrester Researches CEO, George Colony, the fourth wave is about connecting devices to people. Today we still see the computer as the information source. The internet, the cloud, is changing all that. Cloud Computing is part of this trend. According to Colony, there are currently about 2.5 billion devices connected to the cloud. In 8 years there will be over 14 billion. Our watches, our car tires, our health equipment, our climbing gear and much more will be connected. Even today the iPhone is revolutionizing the way people receive information. They are not connected to a traditional PC. They are connected to the cloud and get their information right on this device. As this wave continues, the information we receive will be more natural and integrated into our daily lives. This “connection” changes society once again.

It will take time to work these changes into society. At some point these are generational changes. For instance, my kids grew up with TiVo. For them, they do not understand live TV and why we can’t fast forward commercials. It doesn’t compute. Their expectations will drive change and social acceptance of the changes. They wonder why we can’t rewind the radio, why they can’t play online games in the car and why they can’t have TiVo in the airplane.

Nesbitt put forth a truism that applies to all this change – “Society can only change as fast as people allow it.” The example in the mid-80’s was cash. It was possible even then to do away with cash and create a cashless society. There were clear advantages, but it did not happen. Although we’ve made significant progress towards this, it still has not happened. A trend exists, but this trend is slowed by the desire of people to be in control. We want to write checks and decide who to pay and when. We want to control the process…so the trend slows…but does not go away.

We can control the pace as a society, but the trends exist. Our physical world is being connected. In the early days of computers, the trend was for technology to depersonalize us. We felt as a society that we were being treated as a number. The trend changed. We changed it!

The fourth wave is more about connecting us to our information and to each other. I can go on and on about the digital connection between people. We’ll leave that for another blog. Suffice it to say that the fourth wave will have its problems in society. However, I believe we will battle trends as society that give us less control and separate us as people. We will find ways of better social networking as we become more connected to our information. Perhaps we will find ways of becoming more “humanized” that ever before through controlling the trends the connect us.

The fourth wave is here.

Cloud computing is here.

Marketing will change. Advertising will change. Consumers will demand it. Advertisers will provide it and agencies will adapt their traditional ways of delivering the message. More on this later.