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."