Very much this.

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>.

4. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Control_Revolution>