On Revolutions

Commenting on my recent post 'What Are We Preparing Them For?', Reader Steve writes:

Every generation has a revolution of one type or another. I think what is most pressing is that teachers/education leaders keep operating in the present and not the past, facilitating relevant and meaningful learning opportunities for their students.

On the "relevant and meaningful learning opportunities" front, I totally agree with Steve.

But, on the "Every generation has a revolution of one type or another" meme, I've got a bit of a quibble.

While it's true that each generation sees new things replace old things, few generations get to see new structures replace old structures.

Take mass communication, for instance.

Ever since the introduction of the printing press, mass communication has been accomplished by means of the few spreading ideas to the many through pamphlets, books, radio, TV, etc.

While the specific technology changed (you could say we had a 'Radio Revolution' or a 'Television Revolution'), the structure itself (top-down distribution of information) remained intact.

With the introduction of blogging and social networking, everyone is a content creator; and each content creator has the structural means to compete for a voice with every other content creator regardless of money or power. Seth Godin and others have talked extensively about this.

That structural change marks a revolution of a very unique type; for it marks a structural revolution of the very highest order.

It marks a revolution that alters 500+ years of the way we create and digest mass communication.

I'd say that the Digital Revolution -- or what more precisely might be called the Network Revolution -- is the most recent of only a handful of structural revolutions reaching back thousands of years from the Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolution.

And I'm really trying to refrain from hyperbole here.

I'm literally saying that the current shift in structure that we are witnessing will result in a fundamental shift in culture and social outcomes on the order of those two previous structural revolutions.

I'm literally saying that the current shift is altering and will continue to alter our cultural and social perceptions of hierarchy and authority to degrees we can't imagine.

Disagree?

Consider the ways that the distribution of music, television, and movies has changed over the last decade. You buy CDs anymore? Really? Rush home to catch your favorite show in fear of missing it and being left out of the storyline? Really? Rent movies from a store? Really?

Now apply those patterns to school, government, and medicine.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

We don't really know what life was like on a day-to-day basis before the Agricultural Revolution. But we do have a pretty good idea of what it was like before the Industrial Revolution.

And all we'll have to do is to look back at our scrapbooks of Polaroids to see what it was like before this one.