From the dawn of humanity we have enhanced our ability to communicate. Humans as a species have invented new words, new languages and new ways to tell each other things, particularly as we excerpted more control over the environment around us. Here are a few facts about communications over the short history of mankind:
Homo Sapiens learned to speak (somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago depending on the time-line believed for the birth of our species). What is certain is that we spoke early in human development and have extended language ever since. So basic words like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ were the first human inventions.
We learned to write. Now no-one is certain of when the first writing was done. Early symbols were thought to have been developed about 30,000 years ago. What is certain is that written records were developed independently in four different civilizations across the world, namely Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, and Mesoamerica between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. These are the pre-cursor’s to modern writing.
We know that mankind has had other forms of communications, like smoke signals, although these only survived into the modern era through the Native Americans. We undoubtedly sent written messages to one another as soon as we could use a portable medium, huge stones with Egyptian writing on them could hardly have been sent across the country. The Chinese are known to have written on bamboo at about the same time that papyrus was used in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Papyrus was first used just before 2400 BC. Scrolls were made at this time by weaving papyrus sheets together so it is safe to assume that the first hand-written ‘books’ were produced at that time. The Chinese also made bamboo books at about this time. The first accounting ledgers may also date from this time.
Paper was thought to have been invented in the first or second century AD in China and was widely available in Europe by the 12th century.
The modern printing press was invented in 1440 (However wood block printing was available about 2000 years ago). There were also a series of associated discoveries like movable type, lithography, and others that improved printing methods
The first modern newspaper was in 1605 (however official bulletins existed in the Roman era carved on metal or stone and posted in public places). The Times (of London) has been in circulation since 1785 when it was known as The Daily Universal Register making it the longest running English language daily newspaper.
In the UK the post office improved the efficiency of message delivery and in 1842 making all letters a standard pre-paid cost. The stamp was invented.
It is at this point that your story of communications tales a twist as we looked at other ways to communicate more rapidly, particularly over long distances like the vast tracts of America and Europe’s wide spread colonies across the globe. These are the foundations of electronic communications age.
The invention the telegraph in the 1830′s gave the ability for rapid long distance communication, via wire. Messages had to me coded (the Morse code) in order to be sent across the wires but required a skilled operator to both send and receive messages.
The telephone invented in 1875 by comparison was much more civilised than the telegraph. It brought services closer to the consumer with limited intervention by skilled technicians. By 1880 the first telephone directory was printed. Obviously the first telephone is a far cry from the modern system.
Radio, or wireless communications were invented in either 1891 or 1895 according to opposing claims. This brought about the ability for the first time to send messages to a mass audience.
The modern and popular invention of television added pictures to the voice of radio in 1926.
Radio telephony was first used on the first-class passenger trains between Berlin and Hamburg in 1926. This was the precursor to the modern mobile (or cellular) phone. They have been gaining popularity since the 1950′s when the first mobile devices were introduced, but the 80′s and 90′s were the era of real expansion.
Each of these devices ‘democratised’ the sending of messages by electronic means. The original telephone and telegraph may may not have originally used electricity as such but they ultimately facilitated electronic communications and making the next set of communications capabilities possible. The following machines represent the heart of business communications for much of the 20th century.
The Facsimile Machine was invented as early as 1843 but it went through a number of reinventions upto 1902 when it was possible to send messages between two machines. The ‘Bildtelegraph’ (picture telegraph) was used in Europe, notably for the transmission of a wanted-person photograph from Paris to London in 1908. Although it was not in popular use till the 1970′s.
A global teleprinter network, called the Telex network, was established in the 1920s, and was used through most of the 20th century for business communications.
The Internet has arguably been around since the 1969 when the first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute. Soon after many world universities had their computers linked together via the Joint academic network – JANET. These precursors transitioned into what we know today as the Internet through the 70′s and 80′s.
Of course the last of these, the Internet, has in turn facilitated a whole raft of other communications opportunities for us. Each building of the foundation of inter-computer links.
In 1971 the first email application was created on ARPANET. Early programs had limited functions and were command line driven, but established the basic communications model (including the ‘name@host’ notation) that still exists today – an email gets sent to someone’s mailbox, where it can be picked up at a later time.
Instant Messaging, or on-line chat also appeared around this time. Two people were able to talk MSN style, but they were limited to 70 characters and only one person could type at a time.
The earliest form of electronic Bulletin Boards were created in the early 1970′s with a notion called Community Memory, in 1972, in the Berkeley area in California. However by the mid 70′s people realised that it was possible to bring together on-line communities of like minded individuals. This can be seen as one of the pre-cursor’s to modern Social Media (except not in real time). It was possible to dial-up to ask a question, but getting answers could take several weeks. Limited on-line chat was also possible. Internet forums replaced the traditional BBS in the 90′s with ability for instant access and instant responses.
The creation of the first Web Log (or Blog) is more difficult to ascertain. By the millennium it is certain that there were a number of on-line magazines or journals and I seem to remember contributing to some at this time. One writer claims 1982 as the date of the first blog others define on-line lists of links as 1994, diary as 1995, and news postings as 1997 (See link).
Wikipedia, the world first online encyclopaedia was formally launched in 2001. This became the dawn of a new era of collaborative publishing. Today Wikipedia includes several million freely usable articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors. What is important here is that specialist wiki’s have a variety of uses across the world that can include the rules of a particular sport to corporate business processes.
These have been amazing advances and every success breeds another advance in our ability to communicate. We see email as instant today, yet when it was created it was perhaps less reliable than the postal network at delivering messages. A person had to know they had an email waiting, often necessitating a phone call to tell them. How far we have now gone with the email arriving on the person’s mobile phone almost the moment it is sent.
The first recognizable Social Media site, Six Degrees, was launched in 1997. Unfortunately it closed in 2000 as people were not yet ready to bear the soul to the world. Social Media started to become popular again after 2003 with sites like MySpace, LinkedIn launching. Other sites launched over the next few months. Bebo, Facebook, YouTube and others launched in 2005 (although Facebook had private users some months before this).
The concept of six degrees of separation popularised by John Guare. The idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on the planet. I am not entirely convinced of this but Social Media seems to be making this happen.
The point of this short history of communication is to show that we humans seem to have an almost infinite desire to communicate more effectively. We are inherently social animals. We learned to talk because we are social animals and we have moved this ability to higher and higher levels ever since.
Few of our communications inventions have become extinct simply because of new inventions. The Telegram and the Telex are perhaps the most notable exceptions here. We have simply adopted the new technology as being able to help us do things differently (perhaps even more efficiently). The use of the postal service has declined since the popular use of email and instant messaging in the mid to late 90′s. But post is still essential in delivering bills, magazines and parcels.
The point is humans are adaptive and new communications capabilities will always be arriving. take for example the recent launch of Google Wave in 2009 I see this as adding new collaborative capabilities. Wave is compared most to email, but in fact it is more like a combination of email and Social Media. Does this herald the end of the road for email? Perhaps it does, I have said that it could mean the end of email in 5 years. The point is that we will inevitably adopt new mechanisms to improve collaboration between the groups that need to work together. We are simply adding a new layer that can advance our capabilities further.
The future ultimately is a blank page, if I may steal a writer’s analogy. It is what we do with it that matters.
