A Gift from the Culture
"A Gift from the Culture", published in 1987, is a short work of space opera, by the Scottish science fiction author Iain M. Banks. The story is an early venture into the "complex and unusual and very distant" setting of the Culture, which Banks would further develop through various of full length novels, stories, and his essay "A Few Notes on the Culture".
Jean Gebser
In his 1996 "Coming into Being", William Irwin Thompson compared Gebser's structures of consciousness to Marshall McLuhan's conception of the development of communication technology from oral culture to script culture, alphabetic culture, print culture, and then to the emerging electronic culture. Thompson applied these insights to education theory in his 2001 "Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution". In his 2004 "Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness", and in collaboration with the mathematician Ralph Abraham, Thompson further related Gebser's structures to periods in the development of mathematics (arithmetic, geometric, algebraic, dynamical, chaotic) and in the history of music.