Clothes always had a social signalling component. The signalling dynamic shifted, becoming both increasingly accessible, capable of defining increasingly finer social groups, esspecially those not associated with high-powwer or high-status groups (nobility, royalty, clergy, miltitary, artisans, merchants).
Information is ... somewhat trickier. Clothing is manifest and overt. Information ... mostly isn't. (Memes, logos, jingles, musical hooks, and slogans being prime exceptions.) Possession of specific information becomes a credible (expensive to obtain, hard to falsify) indicator of strong group identity --- whether you're talking about membership within a religious sect, programming subspecialty, profession, banking cabal, political party, or neihbourhood gang. Various fandoms seem to be a reasonably benign (for now) expression of this.
The total number of titles in Europe at the time was about one million. Today, one millon titles are published per year. (http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html) On average, that's one book per 330 Americans. Who read fewer than one book per year, on average.
What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.
Or if different cultures (religious, geographic, professional, political,...) share no common literary or informational references?
> What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.
The mere act of publishing itself is a form of capital and political and social exercise regardless of who reads it.
This is a deep rabbit hole and I don't have time to go into here (there's 2 chapters in this mythical book I speak of on it) but I'll point you in two directions, both centered on xerox
1. As a brief premiere look up the scholarly work 'Xerox Project: Photocopy Machines as a Metaphor for an “Open Society”' - or look into how the open society foundation supposedly helped defeat apartheid south africa and bring down the soviets via copy machines and cottage publications.
2. As a cornerstone of the first step of the modern LGBT rights movement in the 1950s. "ONE magazine", one of the first LGBT magazines using a specific Xerox machine as best I can determine either in Mar Vista or Venice california. Shortly there after, the Mattachine society, a second LGBT rights group, used the same copy machine to do their publication as well. The machine was also used to fight anti-mccarthyist blacklisting publications for the film industry as well. A similar effort happened for civil rights in Jim Crow south (I live in LA so I can do better research on the LGBT stuff since I can drive to the physical archives)
Even if nobody ever read any of these and the publications went into the garbage can, the maturation of thought and the coalition building as a function of the geographic space necessitated by the access to the machines had meaningful political ramifications.
You can also read the book 'Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture' for a decent deep dive on this.
Fads-as-signalling shows up in many places if you look for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...
Information is ... somewhat trickier. Clothing is manifest and overt. Information ... mostly isn't. (Memes, logos, jingles, musical hooks, and slogans being prime exceptions.) Possession of specific information becomes a credible (expensive to obtain, hard to falsify) indicator of strong group identity --- whether you're talking about membership within a religious sect, programming subspecialty, profession, banking cabal, political party, or neihbourhood gang. Various fandoms seem to be a reasonably benign (for now) expression of this.
Denis Didrot despaired at the overwhelming abundance of information facing him and his fellow Encyclopédists, in 1775. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2877
The total number of titles in Europe at the time was about one million. Today, one millon titles are published per year. (http://www.bowker.com/tools-resources/Bowker-Data.html) On average, that's one book per 330 Americans. Who read fewer than one book per year, on average.
What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.
Or if different cultures (religious, geographic, professional, political,...) share no common literary or informational references?