Interesting. Any time access to knowledge becomes cheaper a revolution occurs. Or anytime a monopoly on knowledge disappears. I guess the next revolution occurred with the printing press. And the last, with the internet. Did I miss any other?
And these guys kinda sorta originated as students (student clergy mainly): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards
And in general the students had a lot of power https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/8956... (this PDF has a lot of examples):
> Both students and faculty enjoyed a number of privileges from the state in the Middle Ages. Most of them were not new. From pre-Christian Greece, teachers and students had been free from taxation, free from military service, and in many places free from arrest and trial by civil authorities (Norton, 1909).
> But these privileges did not automatically come to students and faculty. It was because they did not enjoy the same protection as citizens of Bologna that the foreign students organized themselves into nations. When they gained power, the students were almost insatiable in their demands.
> The townspeople were cowed by the students and the professors, both of whom used the migration as a threat to force compliance with their wishes. Threats by students and faculty to move to another city were by no means hollow. Migrations were quite common during the Middle Ages. Most of the major universities of Europe were begun or developed by professors and students who had become unhappy at Bologna or Paris.
An earlier incident at Paris:
> In 1200 a battle in a tavern at Paris resulted in several students being slain by police. The king, fearing the students would migrate, condemned the police and ordered the burning of the homes of the citizens who had fought the students. He also decreed that in the future police must hand students over to the church for punishment, and required that Parisians take an oath not to harm students and to report anyone seen harming a student.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot>
Town-gown frictions date to the earliest European universities:
I see aircraft's role as significant, but more in transporting passengers and (limited) cargo. There is aircraft-based surveillance. And use in warfare as artillery-on-steroids.
I had the realisation some years ago,[1] almost immediately before stumbling across the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. It turns out to be a major component of several general theories of history and/or systems development, see Peter Turchin and David Christian for example. Eisenstein's own work was strongly based on (and remarkably more robust than) Marshall McLuhan's. McLuhan himself built on the work of Canadian Economist Harold Adams Innis.[3]
It seems to me that you can point to, at the very least: emergence of speech, writing, mathematics and geometry (the latter more closely related to maps and earth measurements), various writing media (stone, wood, knotted rope, papayrus, parchment, paper), and the forms of printed works (scrolls, codices, moveable-type books, loose-leaf and other recloseable bindings, index cards, punch cards and other digital data, structured databases, revision control, online comms as email / Usenet / BBSes, Wikis, blogs), various transmission formats (smoke signals, light signalling, telegraph, radio, television, cable, satellite, microwave, fibre optics), lasers (ultimately far more significant in information transmission, storage, and retrieval than as energy systems), etc.
Many times an information transition was marked by a trendous disruption in the established order. The time of the Greeks saw the emergence of the Greek city-states from their predecessors (though there may have been some literate precursors, e.g., Linear A & B), the printing press lit off the Reformation and disruption across Europe for a century. The development of much cheaper and faster presses, as well as a tremendous expansion of literacy in Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries arguably led to the revolutions of 1776 -- 1914. Radio and audiotape played a significant role in the rise of fascism in Europe as well as WWII in the 1930s and 1940s. The television, talk-radio, and cable eras transformed politics from the 1960s--1990s, and expanding Internet, both landline and mobile, from the 2000s to the present.
Biologically it's likely that we can look at development of genetic systems (RNA, DNA), heritable memories or behaviours, learning, and pre-linguistic communications as well.
The ideas have been further developed in the case of business communications by James Beniger in The Control Revolution (1986).[4]
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Notes:
1. Here: <https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/gqzszjwf4unuqfupzqff8g>. Essentially stumbling across the notion that each advance in communications, storage, and/or processing likely led to a tremendous capabilities change and disruption (though not necessarily advantage) to the society in which it emerged.
2. Eisenstein developed the idea both in book length (<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-ag...>), and somewhat more concisely in a journal article: <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720>). Both available via LibGen.
3. Noted variously, see <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4610816> or Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis>.