All Change.

on Jan 13 in Bristol, Culture, Digital tagged by Peter Blackman

Bristol Cathedral Choir School was founded in 1542, so the 20 years that have passed since I attended a school assembly there are no more than the turn of a single page  in its history book.

Over Christmas I gave my father (who used to teach at the school) the gift of a DVD of a BBC documentary made on the school in 1965. Before he met my mother. Long before my brother, sister and I appeared in the world. Despite the grainy black and white footage, the boys, staff, and buildings of BCS (as it then was) looked very similar to when I went there in 1982. In that time it felt, very little changed. But now? In the last five years it has changed almost beyond recognition. When I went there it was a fee paying, single sex, independent school. Now it is a state academy. It is ethnically diverse and co-educational. It is more, and let me choose my words carefully here for fear of sounding old and reactionary…it is more casual and less formal. More relaxed, less strict. So much change, in so little time.

This morning the 13th January 2011 the students enjoyed a talk by Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of wikipedia. Wales is more than a single page in the history of the internet. He, or more accurately his website is 3,527,535 page articles in the English Wikipedia alone. Wikipedia is at the forefront of a pace of change in our society that The Guardian Editor, Alan Rusbridger has likened to the invention of the Gutenberg revolution. He quotes the historian John Man, who puts the Gutenberg revolution like this:

“Suddenly, in a historical eye-blink, scribes were redundant. One year, it took a month or two to produce a single copy of a book; the next, you could have 500 copies in a week. Hardly an aspect of life remained untouched … Gutenberg’s invention made the soil from which sprang modern history, science, popular literature, the emergence of the nation-state, so much of everything by which we define modernity.”

Today it felt as if I was looking at a physical definition of modernity. That the fundamental changes of the online world also go on in front of our eyes in the corporate, cultural and educational world.  Of how an institution like a six hundred year old school which had previously proceeded through the centuries, taking on change like a glacier slowly embracing a landscape was now being forced into seismic, fundamental changes by changes in society and culture.