From 1663 The Royal society had a charter from the king which allowed its members to wear badges with lions on and to obtain the bodies of executed people for study.

They were also permitted to use the dangerous technology of the printing press to publish “things matters and affairs”…and which would eventually become the first scientific journal. There were important cultural assets in the environment already – the meetings had been formally organised since 1660, and had been going on for some twenty years prior to that informally around the ideas of Francis Bacon.

An excellent series of In our time Podcasts covered the period at the start of this year.

It’s important to keep in mind a dialectic between the technology and everything else that is going on in society. Talking about the scientific revolution: Clay Shirky points out at the end of this Guardian podcast:

“it was taking the raw capability of the printing press and wrapping in the cultural virtues that made science possible.”
I would expect similar transformations to occur with the new technology, which is to say that it will tend to raise informal groups, which seem to be on the margins of society at present, to prominence and power. It is not so likely that institutions which are already prestigious and powerful will quickly take up web 2.0 and transform themselves.

Shirky regards it as an open question whether the necessary structures will emerge to get creation of “higher order value”. My feeling too is that we’re still in the early days of that, and that nothing quite as noticeable and dramatic may emerge…

In my neighbourhood, at the moment I’m hoping that residents will get linked up on our equivalent of Facebook vkontakte.ru to improve the running of our condominium, a community that includes more than a thousand flats, and where the democratic struggle is still fought by a mixture of photocopied samizdats, and physical intimidation.

In my profession, the most serious discussion of methodology in the early noughties was in a yahoo email forum named after a trend in European cinematography.

As we move into a post-theory and post-industrial society, the structures we need are specialised and flexible; and the cultures we produce will quite likely not aspire to universal truth or recognition. They may not need to go on for hundreds of years like the Royal Society or decades, like the Centre for Research in Modern and European Philosophy.