Matt Locke has uncovered some wonderful stuff looking into slow networks:

“Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…”

» Test.org.uk: More slowness – “L’affaire des Quatorze”