Don’t we shudder when we think that in a time of popular emotion all it takes is a word, just one word imprudently spoken without hatred by an honest man, to provoke so horrible a murder?
EUGÈNE SUE, THE WANDERING JEW
The most illuminating book ever written about social media was published in 1895. It is called La Psychologie des foules — or, in the English translation that appeared a year later, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. The book is a work of social science that reads like the work of a seer.