30 Nov 2012 17:36:32
Thanks to Twitter and smart phones, "communication has become the most important activity of modern life." But our much vaunted information society is not new, argues Darnton, an American historian: "Information has permeated every social order since humans learned to exchange signs". Darnton turns detective in this fast-moving account of a 1749 police investigation into a poem critical of Louis XV. The "Affair of the Fourteen", as it became known, began with the arrest of a medical student who had recited the poem. Interrogated in the Bastille, he revealed the source of the poem. This man was also arrested and interrogated. Soon 14 "purveyors of poetry" – priests, students, clerks and even a professor – were arrested. But despite this the authorities never identified the author of the poem. It was, suggests Darnton, "a case of collective creation" – what we might now term a crowd-sourced work. This fascinating study reveals that the streets of Paris were buzzing with news of public affairs. As Darnton says, "the information society existed long before the internet."
