Approximately 12,000 years ago, in what we now call the Middle East, people began to domesticate grain, which involved a process that slowly spread around the world over the next 6,000 to 7,000 years. In 1984, 8 percent of U. S. households had a computer; by 2008, that number was estimated to be above 70 percent. How do these two things relate to social change?

Toffler believed that the technological changes taking place in Western society completely determine the course of socio-economic development as a whole and stimulate the processes of social change. Therefore, the history of society is characterized by a constant acceleration in development. Toffler proposed a periodization scheme for the history of human society, based on the identification of stages or waves of technological development: the first wave corresponds to the agrarian period (chronologically, this is the time before the industrial revolution began); the second wave is associated with the industrial revolution, industrialization and the scientific and technological revolution and marks the onset of the era of industrial society; the third wave is determined by the dominance of the production of services over the production of material goods and speaks of the formation of a super industrial society.