The upheaval caused by generation advances in information tech since 1820. The big one was the sudden appearance of broadcast radio in 1926. Television was a bit more nuanced in economic effect, most of the damage being done by radio.
TV let production and consumption agree into precisely measured tribal associations, as in McLuhan. The consumer demographic agrees to join a tribe and gets to share in the economies of scale. So, if the young sect agreed a sports car was a Mustang, then the cost of Mustangs came way down. The medium of agreement being TV.
The web breaks the mold again. The web commercializes the last mile, I think, unavoidably. Transportation will seek huge gains by pushing the web into its vehicles and cargo, driven by consumer enhance knowledge of where the goods are.
Let me update this post with a side note about radio in the early 20s. The first economic impact was felt in agriculture as the amateur radio became an essential tool for broadcasting crop rices. Information about crop inventories now arrive three days earlier, allowing the fine tuning iof harvest, But that, in turn, put pressure on farm transportation which now favored farmer owned trucks. Agriculture became more capital intensive because the farm could use transportation more timely.
The second note here is that the first amateur radios used Morse code, which all the farm operators learned. Yet again communications technology compounding n the electrical revolution. One can trace a very clear development path from Samuel Morse to the Internet web.
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