The Shift Age is about humanity's new era. As the Information Age gives way to the Shift Age, we are entering a time of transformation and change that offers both great risk and incredible opportunity. Why do things happen so fast? Why do we feel unsettled, even out of control? David Houle identifies and explains the dynamics and forces that already have reshaped and will continue to reshape our world for the next 20 years. He comments from the front lines of the Shift Age on issues and topics that affect our lives. We have entered the final, global stage of humanity's cultural, social, and economic evolutionary journey: the Shift Age.
Excerpt from Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The Shift Age in Context
We now live in the Shift Age, a time of transformation that will be regarded by future historians as one of the most significant periods in human history. How we navigate these next 20 to 30 years will determine whether these future historians praise our perspicacity or wonder why we failed to grasp the evolutionary imperatives so obvious to them. As the world entered the final quarter of the 20th century, it became clear that one age was giving way to another. While the new age was not yet fully formed, its early manifestations suggested a clear direction. The massive increase in college graduates in the United States due first to the GI Bill post World War II (officially, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944) and then to the baby boomer generation, the transformation of the workforce from blue- to white-collar, the advent of computers and their migration into everyday life, and the launch of communications satellites all presaged the onset of something new.
From the vantage point of the Industrial Age, it appeared that this new age was about information, so the coming time was christened the Information Age by scholars, futurists, and historians alike. This name became part of the vernacular and has been used to define our time ever since. The great future-thinker and historian Alvin Toffler called it the Third Wave, following the previous waves of industry and agriculture. These terms are now some 30 years old, and during this time the speed of change has only accelerated. Unexpected transformation has occurred. It is time to give the age we live in a new name because it is a new place than what it was projected to be by those who gave the Information Age its name decades ago.
Welcome to the Shift Age.
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