Before I go into the depths of the meaning of Communication & Technology as a joint concept, I’m going to first explain a part of my background that can provide context to my answer.
My parents moved away from Peru before I was born, so it has always been only the five of us, my parents and two sisters, living in Paraguay. Since I can remember, my dad has always been traveling for work as well, whether it’s for three days or three weeks at a time. When I was 11, my older sister left for college to Argentina, 7 years later I left to the Middle East, and 2 years following my last sister left for Europe. Today, there are points in time where all five of us are on different parts of the world working around multiple time zones.
I remember as a child, when there was no such thing as free instant messaging or Wifi on mobile phones, that my mother would tell me “send a line of text over to your father so he knows you’re thinking about him”. Just a line, because he was on roaming and that costed more money.
As soon as my mother got her first computer, we would switch to emails. Now we also had to email my grandma, who was living on Peru. Before the email, we would only communicate with my extended family on each other’s birthdays, and we would have to do this over the landline phone. When we were together, we would sing Las Mañanitas at 7 am and walk into the birthday person’s room, and if someone wasn’t present, we would make sure to call them so they could sing along.
But now times have changed, it’s the year 2018, I’m pretty sure we don’t own a landline phone and my grandma has a better iPhone than I do. Every other Sunday, the five of us plus my grandma would connect through ao six way call on Facebook Videochat, which always ends up with all of us putting on filters on our faces (It’s surprisingly my dad who starts with the filters). That is now how we celebrate our birthdays whenever we cannot be together, and as soon as the call starts, have to yell “1 2 3” and then we would start to sing Las Mañanitas. We communicate on a daily basis through WhatsApp, and I was also now recently added to my extended family group chat, along my 20 other cousins and uncles. On my nuclear family chat, my dad has become the master of selfies, and he sends them over so we can see how he’s doing, my mother loves sending links to interesting articles, my grandmother lives off voice notes, and my sisters and I take any advantage to send memes that everyone can understand.
In his book “The Information”, James Gleick first mentions that, “Each new information technology, in its own time, sends off blooms in storage and transmission”. If the printing press caused dictionaries, encyclopedias, and almanacs; the creation of internet caused phenomenon such as messenger, voicenotes, videoconferences, and filters (and of course, much more). He continues to say that “every new medium transforms the nature of human thought”, which is true. Now we can share experiences in a variety of forms that allows for multiple levels and types of interactions. Levels vary from singular comments, constant messaging, and video chat. However, the push for continuous and deeper forms of communication only reach the closest nodes.
However, I do believe that regardless of the modification of interaction that came with technological development, the core of communication has remained constant. Humans still want to send the same type messages. A birth announcement in Bolenge, a village of the Belgian Congo, used to be announced through the thump of drums that could carry six or seven miles, a distance measure that reaches everyone within a physical radius. Now some births are announced through Facebook posts, with a bunch of cute baby pictures, and these announcements are able to reach up to the furthest node in a virtual network. I currently have 2,257 “friends” on Facebook, which makes me incapable to locate where this last node would even lie. But the point here lies on the fact that, regardless of the dimension of reach, the message is still the same: someone has been born.Love letters and heart emojis (in a specific context) still reflect the same emotion. A text saying “I miss you and I hope everything is going well in your trip” to my dad, means the same thing as him taking a selfie and sending it to us through Whatsapp – to us, both convey the same type of “I’m thinking of you”.
Therefore, in this context, I would conclude that technology has allowed us to transmit the same essence of communication in multiple platforms, with ever changing dynamics that will keep morphing into different forms as new ones come across. And as these keep developing, we will still want to display the same type core of messages, since these lie within the human essence. At the end of the day, regardless of how many devices we have at hand, it is us humans who have control over our forms of communication.
