2012-02-16

Socionomics and the Information Revolution

In Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, he predicts a growing lack of consensus in the Information Age, due to the emergence of instantaneous mass communication (I'm going from memory, having read the book about 15 years ago.). He predicts a fracturing of the market into smaller segments, be it specialized TV channels and magazines, to the formation of new communities. What's interesting about Toffler's predictions is how they line-up with socionomic predictions. Instead of creating larger communities, he predicted smaller ones. As social mood declines in the 2000s, this tendency will be magnified as people turn inwards. There been some push for new governments, reminiscent of the city-state period in European history. This is predicted by Toffler and other "futurists," but it is social mood that can deliver the big push when people become dissatisfied with their current government. Thus, the decline in social mood will also see an acceleration of the shift towards an information economy. What futurists were predicting in the 80s and 90s have already started to appear, but the transition will accelerate in the coming decade.

I've been thinking about Toffler's work and how it fits with current social mood for awhile and this post by Daniel Hannan brought it to mind again.

Americans! Please stop calling us Europeans!
The change in attitude has happened over the past decade. As late as the first Bush presidency, most American opinion-formers, including most conservatives, vaguely favoured the idea of a united Europe. Federalism had worked on their side of the Atlantic, they would tell you, and Americans were fed up with being dragged into European wars. Nowadays, if you hear this sort of rot, you're almost certainly talking to a State Department official.

Why the new mood? In part, it's a delayed reaction to Europe's anti-yanquismo. The moment the Cold War was over, Euro-federalists started calling for Brussels to take on the hyper-power; but it wasn't until the second Iraq war that most Americans realised quite how intensely the Brussels élites disliked them. Nor is anti-Americanism confined to the Left. Last month, for example, the influential Christian Democrat who chairs the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that the euro crisis was the result of a British-American plot.
We've seen Europe and the United States shift their opinions and we're likely to see further moves. This harkens back to the 19th Century, when the U.S. was dedicated to creating American culture and institutions apart from and/or in opposition to Europe. The creation of American football, for example, stems from a push for American sports.

He closes the piece with a look at England's cultural ties:
Britain is a common-law democracy, connected by outlook and sentiment to the wider community of English-speaking nations. We may be only 22 miles from Europe but, these days, distance hardly matters. Look at where our international telephone calls go: North America, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand. In an age of Twitter and cable television, geographical proximity is trumped by ties of language and law, habit and history, blood and speech. As a Europhile columnist recently lamented, the Internet has trapped us in the Anglosphere. Which, if you think about it, is another way of saying that our cultural élites no longer get to tell us who we are.

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