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The telegraph was widely hailed as a technology that would abolish misunderstanding between nations and end war, because instant communication was assumed to produce mutual understanding. Instead it sped up diplomatic crises and made coordinating military campaigns easier. This shows that connectivity amplifies whatever intentions users already hold rather than changing those intentions.
In 1836, the twins François and Joseph Blanc bribed operators of the French state optical telegraph between Paris and Bordeaux. The operators inserted deliberate errors into official messages, and those errors signaled the direction of Paris government-bond prices to the twins' agents in Bordeaux. The scheme ran for about two years, and the twins were acquitted because no law yet covered it. The case shows fraud exploiting a network's information asymmetry before the law had caught up with the technology.
Telegraph operators chatted, joked, gambled and courted each other over the wires during idle hours. They used their own shorthand and recognized each other by the individual style of their keying. Several romances and weddings were conducted entirely by wire. A shared digital medium produced social bonds, identity signals and intimacy among people who had never met, long before computers existed.
Once messages moved instantly, the constraint on communication moved from transmission to the people who had to handle it. Businesspeople complained of a faster pace of life and of information overload. Messages piled up in central offices, which had to invent pneumatic tube systems and sorting methods to cope. Looking at any speed-up this way shows that the costs reappear downstream as congestion, stress and demands for immediate response.