For centuries, even important messages took weeks to be transmitted over long distances. A letter from the Pope in Rome to the bishops in Northern Europe, say, could take several weeks to be delivered in stages by messengers on horseback.
The time it took for such a letter to be delivered stayed roughly the same from the time of the Roman Empire until the mid-19th century. In 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first message using Morse code, thereby inventing the concept of electronic messaging. One of the forerunners of digitisation. This cut the time it took to transmit messages from weeks to seconds.