When does a ripple become a tidal wave?

They say there is a magic combination of time, place, situation, voice, maturity and preparation that creates the right time to learn.

In my third year of Environmental Studies at the University of Manitoba it was an afternoon lecture by Eric Lye. One hundred students crowded into a room designed for fifty listened to a three hour lecture about history, culture and the history of culture. It was not the first university lecture on this topic nor was it the last, but it was a pivotal one. It could have been the intensity of the presentation, or the continuity of the information flow or the enthusiasm and earnestness of Professor Lye.

The lecture explained the cyclical nature of cultural development, how certain shifts in technology or politics rippled their effects through various aspects of our lives. In the architecture world this would be influences in urban planning, building design, landscape architecture, interior design and industrial design. In the rest of the world this would also include art, literature, music and politics. For our contemporary world we would add technology, institutions and social structures.

In general terms an innovation would come from the need to remove a limitation. Significant innovations in one realm would be followed by a gradual evolution in the other aspects of culture.

The need to perpetuate the ‘bigger tower’ syndrome of Renaissance Florence may have produced the reason to invent the elevator and steel framed construction. This enabled high rise buildings which had an effect on property values, then city planning, then corporate structures, and on and on... Without too much of a stretch this continued to influence politics and terrorism when the destruction of the towers embodied the attack on western democracy.

If you subscribe to the notion of disruptive innovation there are improvements that have the potential to cause unexpected cultural shifts.

Firstly assume knowledge is power: if I know something that has the potential to affect your life I have power over your life.

At the time before writing knowledge and history lived and died or became immortal at the pleasure of the tribal sage. The invention of writing gave the potential to possess knowledge to the wealthy and literate. Gutenberg’s printing press took the control of the distribution of knowledge away from the scribes. Although some religions still exercised their territorial imperative by using dead languages the industrial revolution and mass production gave knowledge to the huddled literate masses.

The structure of knowledge has become democratic. Digital technologies and high speed transmission not only delivers knowledge to any computer connected to electricity and wi-fi, they also reverse the flow allowing everyone to document the human experience and  publish for the world market.Today social media is giving birth to forces that are initiating political transformations.

What will this mean to our culture? What institutions, formed on the foundation of controlling knowledge, will have to shape-shift to remain relevant?

If you are a teacher, principal or student what do you think about digital technologies: are they tools, threats, passing fads or investments? 
If a student enrolls in an on-line course is that betrayal, a loss of control or a new opportunity?
How do you measure performance when the retention of knowledge is removed from the list of priorities?
What new physical structures are required to accommodate the new social organizations?