Communication Understood Through the Looking Glass of Technological Advances

I recently came to the realization that technology is much more than I previously thought. I tried to define it from my perspective and also bring it into a larger context in this post. Today I will try to paint a picture how different technological advances bring forth paradigm changes that affect how human civilization unfolds and I will try to be as down to earth as possible with the example chosen.

Firstly, let me just share what I consider it to be: technology is human understanding and ingenuity applied towards the facilitation of a certain outcome. In other words, with time, people will reach their goals in an increasingly efficient way and in many cases with added benefits. I would like to look through this magnifying glass of technological advances at an intrinsic part of human nature and try to put into perspective the effects each upgrade brought to human civilization.

As I stated in the post linked at the beginning of this article, technology is not just electric or mechanical devices, it’s also much deeper and nuanced than that and comes in a lot of shape and sizes. The piece of technology that will be discussed in this post is quite subtle and is communication, which is the technology sharing information and cooperating. I would argue that this is a large part of the foundation for civilization, and we will see how different communication technologies brought forward major changes on how people are able to pass on information. So, let’s take it from the beginning.

Non-verbal communication

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Because humans are social beings, communication was something that happened naturally and the first instance of it was non-verbal. This allowed people to cooperate on a low scale and also share basic information. At this point, the level of human understanding that can be shared is very low and does not give way to complex social structures.

Verbal communication

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I think that the first major innovation in communication was language itself. With time, humans evolved and so did their understanding of the environment, this was coupled with the development of the prefrontal cortex which came with additional processing power. Because humans now had a more precise and detailed understanding, they felt the need to communicate it better. Thus we started pairing objects and actions to certain sounds, which eventually gave way to language as we know it today.

This way of communication, compared to the non-verbal one, is orders of magnitude more efficient, giving us the possibility of passing on precise information and create elaborate cooperation schemes. Therefore, I believe that the advent of language is the starting point of civilization because the paradigm was changed from vague to specific information communication, which gave way to building different social structures.

Written communication

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This is the second major innovation in communication and brought forward a degree of permanence and mobility. When we only had spoken words, all the knowledge had to be memorized and the passing on of information went through a subjective filter that could give way easily to errors. Although this was way better that non-verbal communication, it was very hard for knowledge to circulate and be stored because it resided in the mind of people that can forget it or keep it for themselves.

With the advent of written language, human understanding now had a semi-permanent form that could easily travel. This facilitated the communication between different groups of people with a far less degree of subjectivity and interpretation, but this lead to centralization. For example, in Europe, the Church had a monopoly on book creation, which lead to just certain information being accepted as valid and just a few people having access to it because of the high cost of making a handwritten book. So, culture was now controlled by a central authority that decided which knowledge can be given to the people. With this upgrade, communication became quite specific but was not accessible.

The printing press

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The previous two innovations were quite subtle, but this one starts being something we are accustomed to. The printing press still related to written language and does not bring a new dimension to how communication occurs, but it changed the game of the creation and distribution of knowledge.

If book manufacturing was previously costly and time-consuming, the printing press changed this forever. Books were not produced at scale very cheap and this brought forward several changes. Firstly, the democratization of information, because now there was no one gatekeeper that decided which information is relevant to the people. Secondly, knowledge shifted from being a scarce resource to being an accessible one, now regular people could learn and understand much more than ever before. This lead to mass literacy and changed the informational paradigm from scarce to accessible.

The mobile internet

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We all know this one. With smartphones and mobile internet, knowledge is all around us and can be accessed easily. This is another paradigm change that took information from being accessible to abundant. Any person with a smartphone and an internet connection has access to much more information that the best scholar or librarian even 20 years ago.

The effects of affordable, non-discriminatory global communication are immense. This technology of communication was able to reshape human civilization in just a couple of years and is only in its infancy. One could only imagine where this can go, but I’ll give it a try.

The singularity

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This is a term that describes the merging of human consciousness with the digital realm. Basically having a new layer of consciousness that gives instant access to all the digital information available.

If this happens, I don’t even know how to describe the paradigm change, but it will have a most profound influence on human civilization by providing instant, crystal clear, all-encompassing, global communication.

Conclusion

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In this post, we were able to observe how the goal of communication was addressed at different levels of understanding and how it took different forms that seem to be getting better and better. Language was able to bring clarity of information, the written word gave it permanence and mobility, the printing press gave mass access and the internet brought information in an abundant form.

This is just an example that is apparent in history and one that can be easily explained, but this mechanism of bettering things applies to almost all human endeavors. I would argue that technology is the only thing that moves us forward as a species and the sooner we realize this, the sooner we can build a culture of positive technological research aimed towards the bettering of all aspects of life.