The process of communication can be mirrored to an art and an ever-growing web that uses vastly different media across eras, centuries, cultures and continents to achieve the transfer of information from point A to point B. The latter are just fillers and can be nominally substituted by the terms ‘person’, ‘machine’, or any combination of emitter/receiver there possibly is.

                   Such a statement of mine stands solely because at the very core of communication is the idea of transmitting information. In the early pages of The Information, James Gleick offers insights into key technological development that saw the day around the mid-twentieth century and have since then, been major building blocks into the modern day heavy influx of information we experience on a daily basis. When Claude Shannon coined the term bit in A Mathematical Theory of Communication, little did we imagine the dimension it would take on six decades later, with the rapid advent of the internet and computer-centered information technologies. Simultaneously, the development of the transistor by Bell Telephone Labs, nowadays a component in most electronic gadgets, would prove a major step away from the telegraph’s technology by being able to input the sound of human voice at one end as an electricity signal and deliver it at the other end as an output current that could be reconverted to sound. Technology and communication hand-in-hand. The closeness information theory and science between the two becomes even more evident when we look at semantics and the frequency at which they interweave. Most Latin languages have as an equivalent to the English term ‘computer science’ a variation of the word information: informatique, informatica, informatik…The ability to extract genetic information from DNA has revolutionized not only the field of biology but has turned around crime investigations, forensic police analysis and fuelled the growth of fields such as bioinformatics. Whichever way we decide to look at it, information finds its way at the center of the conversation especially in our modern times, where it is shared at an insane speed, watched over and over, listened to on a podcast, stored in clouds and feeds companies big data about our not-so-private-anymore lives.

                  The approach Gleick takes in starting his discussion is one that I enjoyed very much as his recount of the singular African drumming language is one I can relate to very much, or that I least have heard of since I was a kid. The layers of complexity added into it, the elongated many poetic turns, alliterations and heavy imagery used to clearly get information across from village to village is something remarkable. It is even funny that European missionaries and explorers on their trips across the continent would often express astonishment towards autochthonous populations they labeled “savage” and “unlettered” but capable of producing a communication technology that far surpassed any other at the time. Morphing speech into sound and rhythm and still have the ability to extract the intended meaning from it is a feat.

                   But if there is a crucial takeaway from this, it is that transmission models (languages, phones, radars) all need a decoder on the receiving end. A talking drum can be understood only by one who has the knowledge of its workings and can interpret its sounds, cadence, rhythm at will; whales communicate via low frequency sounds only they can decipher; bats can echolocate quasi-perfectly their surroundings in sheer pitch darkness because they are equipped with ears capable of decoding high-frequency waves that go up to 10,000Hz -and have inspired many technologies such as sonars or radars- ; English can be the most spoken language in the world yet if we were to take a person who has never had exposure to the language and put them in an Anglophone setting, all they would be able to hear are sounds coming from people’s mouths without being able to make sense of it because their brain is yet to be fine tuned and adapted to the intonations, meanings, phonetics of the English language words and vice-versa. Now, the capacity to decode information can be innate and require built-in attributes (as is the case for many animals) or something that can be learned from scratch (as is the case for human-created languages and technologies).

For me, it all comes down to the fact that we communicate in more ways than we even do acknowledge sometimes, which should reinstate the notion that it is at the core of human life and that from our first wailings as babies. Technology, parallelly has a tied destiny to it, in that it is working, as if pushed by an invisible hand, to keep innovating on finding new, faster, easier or more complex (e.g. encrypted intelligence messages) ways to communicate. Maybe the next big thing is to build the technology that will allow us to have a comprehensible communication with animals? Who knows? Your pet might teach you quite a few things about yourself…or you might just want to chat with a shark at sea. The future holds the answer.

-Yéro Niamadio