“Today the challenge of political courage looms larger than ever before. For our everyday life is becoming so saturated with the tremendous power of mass communications that any unpopular or unorthodox course arouses a storm of protests such as John Quincy Adams - under attack in 1807 - could never have envisioned.”

A sentence that has never been more relevant than in 2011 but hard to imagine that it was written over 50 years ago when only half of US households even had televisions.

I have read John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” several times and am often struck by how relevant many of the passages are to the century I now live in, not least on his understanding of communications and its importance.

In the first weeks of 2011, we have already seen the political winds raging through Whitehall, fuelled by 24-hour news and social media comment, buffeting the government on issues such as the Schools Sport Partnership, votes-for-prisoners, housing benefit and tuition fees.

In 1955 the news cycle was at least 24 hours long, often longer, allowing Kennedy and his fellow leaders the luxury of considering events and developing a response that could head off the potential crisis.

No such time exists now. Today the cycle can be 24 minutes long, increasingly driven by non-traditional news sources, and those at the eye of the storm often feel obliged to provide instantaneous responses for fear of losing control of the story.

But it is not just in the media. New communications technologies are the central tools for policy-makers and industry, transforming every facet of life, from business to schools, and the corridors of power to the home.

So important is digital media today that the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, whose overall theme is: "What is the New Economic Reality?", has devoted one of its five main topics to: “How are digital media and technology changing not just whole industries, but human society?”.

Davos is a surreal experience. It sits adjacent to Klosters in the Swiss Alps, a playground for the wealthy and famous and its permanent residents number just 11,000. However for 40 years, it has been host to the WEF, an annual January gathering of the world’s most influential people, wrestling with the biggest issues of the day.

Some 2,500 Presidents, Prime Ministers, business leaders, financiers, activists, journalists and philanthropists descend on the city turning it into a fortress in the mountains.

And it is not just a good excuse for a ski trip. It provides a genuine environment for debate and discussion among global leaders, a place where they can mix more freely than the formal settings of Washington, Westminster or Brussels. This freedom can result in tectonic plate-shifting moments, such as 1989 when East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl met to discuss German reunification; and five years later Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat reached agreement over Gaza and Jericho.

For digital technologies to be viewed sufficiently important by this global elite to be placed at the heart of their agenda should make us take notice. Among the debates was a discussion called: Preparing for New Realities.

It included academics, venture capitalists and politicians and considered the challenges of a world moving beyond the industrial age and nation states and how this impacted on solving global problems through government, educations, healthcare and the media.

Among its conclusions was the idea that many of the institutions that served the industrial age are running out of steam, being replaced by the emergence of a new set of institutions, more appropriate and equipped for the future.

This was particularly important in education where it was recommended that greater use of online learning technology could help address the challenge of inequality in higher education. In schools, digital channels and technologies could support teachers in broadening their information and be key to ongoing improvements in standards.

There were recommendations for governments too, where greater consideration should be given to the new digital reality. Governments should find ways to transform policy development and delivery, taking the position of aggregator and facilitator of information and services to solve specific challenges.

Beyond this discussion, there were others on: Connectedness; Digital Convergence; Leading in a Hyper-Connected World; and, of course, the Wikileaks Dilemma, focusing on networks, platforms and infrastructure as drivers of policy, products and services.

Among the key findings and recommendations of the panels were:

Mobile telephony will drive the development of applications and new platforms will breathe new life into the struggling creative industries.

• Open source, rather than closed, platforms will prevail - they benefit the customer.
• Investors are looking for entrepreneurs who can promise to disrupt existing businesses.
• A balance must be struck between maintaining privacy and providing connectedness.

It is quite a world away from the one inhabited by Jack Kennedy. You wonder what he would have made of it but given his mastery of communications, we probably know the answer.