Technologies of Communication

For a very, very long time, people communicated only with other people who were physically near them. Artwork was a way to leave simple messages, but if you wanted to discuss complex ideas, you had to be in the same physical space as the people you were talking to. This is called an oral culture, and there are still people who live like this where communities are more tight-knit and intergenerational (grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and children living with or near each other). Knowledge is held by elders (like the grandparents) and passed down to younger people by listening to them. Knowledge and wisdom in the community is based on the experiences of the past generations.

 You are probably not from an oral culture, instead, you are probably from a written or print culture. Written cultures are not that old compared to oral cultures. Written cultures began with the ability to print words onto paper for distribution in the 15th century. Even though the alphabet was invented around 1000 BCE and paper around 100 CE, it took a long time before most people in a community began reading and writing.

 With a written alphabet, paper, books, and a system of transportation to move all of this around, complex ideas could be communicated and discussed even when people were not in the same physical space. It may have taken a while, but someone in England could write a letter to a relative living in another country and expect to have a letter written back. Before paper and writing, you would not have been able to communicate with someone who lived far away, but you were also much less likely to know someone who lived far away. Most people rarely left their local communities. Faster transportation and the ability to communicate over long distances may have led to more people moving from their home communities.

 The ability to communicate over long distances sped up with the spread of railroads in the early 19th century. The electric telegraph was invented in 1838 and it let people communicate written messages faster than people could actually move. Wires criss-crossed across the land and were laid under oceans which got rid of the earlier space and time limits. Some people, like the author Henry David Thoreau, wondered if people who lived so far apart really needed to communicate with each other. In 1876, the telephone was invented and let people actually speak to someone far away, rather than just being able to send a written message.

 These long-distance, instant communications never completely replaced the slower, physical letters or talking face-to-face, but it started to make people think about communication in different ways. Some, like the Amish, are still hesitant to use telephones because of their ability to interrupt the people in a shared physical space. Those that do have phones keep them outside in a separate building to avoid the disruption.

 Smartphones and the internet have started what can be thought of as a screen culture. Now we can talk, text, video, and enter into virtual reality with anyone, anywhere in the world, and at any time. What do we lose as we are able to communicate with anyone in the world with the cell phone in our pocket? It is absolutely amazing that I can video chat with a friend on the other side of the world, but what do I give up when I do this? Now, we can be interrupted by anyone from anywhere at any time.

 To continue to investigate the technologies of communication, review the sources below and complete one or more of the suggested activities.