Currently enjoying Mark Warschauer’s “Electronic Literacies”: in chapter one he makes the strong point that the Gutenberg era took hold only through the massive social and economic changes of the industrial revolution. The printing press technology had been ready for some time.
Mark reckons that the current acceleration of technological change in the fields of literacy and communication is deeply connected with the current industrial revolution, “based on the harnessing of information, knowledge and networks”. He adds that this current information-based revolution is not only industrial, but also social and economic.
So, according to Warschauer, it’s not so much the technologies that change the way we work and learn, rather it’s the huge social changes going on around us that drive the need for new thinking-interacting-learning tools.
Seems to me, that social networks appear to be taking up the new literacy technologies faster than “industry”. For example, Murdoch playing catch-up with the people’s “myspace”. Or the original Napster, targeted as a villain by the music companies, before being co-opted into the new paradigm it helped to create.