did you know that cities in germany with at least one printing press by 1500 were 29% more likely to be protestant by 1600 than those without? That’s just one example of power structures rapidly changing in sync with rapid shifts in the information infrastructure.
Another is the enlightenment - only here the technology is the same, still the printing press, and what’s changing is the values driving what becomes widespread. What’s published in the enlightenment isn’t following the old, religious/feudal value system of the church. Now it follows the value system of the market: popular demand decides what gets the widest distribution, what has the broadest impact. This is the era of the novel, and it culminates in those great revolutions of popular demand, American, Haitian, French. This is the information paradigm out of which our american government emerged.
at the beginning of the 20th century you see the rise of what Walter Ong calls ‘secondary orality’ - the ability to record and transmit the human voice at great distances and to large audiences, a transition Ong links to the rise of fascism. I don’t know anything about that, but I can tell you this: a popular art form makes a transition to ‘high art’ when its medium has becom outdated and irrelevant. this was the anxiety of the modernist novelists. print was no longer the central technology of mass communication, but they had still deeply internalized its forms. (this is also the description of the modernists that leads into my argument for lovecraft as a modernist, but thats for another time.)
Now we see a new shift, from the centralization of television to the hyperliteracy of the internet. the affordances and weaknesses of this new medium will shape the next century, assuming it doesn’t get promptly replaced by something else. This, i guess, is why i’m so interested in learning more about it: i want to read the future.