Facebook to Instagram: A “trying” rewiring experiment

I ran a week-long rewiring experiment. Facebook is de facto, the social network I run to by default. Twitter comes second. I neither had a Snapchat nor an Instagram account before I decided to run this experiment. It turned out to be super interesting and full of personal takeaways. Since I was making up for this assignment over the break, I decided to stay away from Facebook and not necessarily de-activate my account. I thus created an Instagram account, having a vague idea of how it worked and setting as rules to not follow any page, but to enter things and people I was interested about in the “search” tab. It made me realize the ways in which our social media behavior is truly shaped by each of those platforms’ peculiarities. More importantly, I became much more aware of my tendencies and things that stimulated me to go onto my preferred platform: Facebook. Here’s how.

From the moment I landed in Dakar, I decided I was going to stay off Facebook from the 23rd Dec. until Dec. 31st. Surely a good detox idea, but also one that I took at a time where it’s challenging to stay off Facebook as activity levels peak during the festive period, and it is tempting to read friends’ posts summarizing their year, people sending me good wishes, notifications from my sports pages about English Football, which is the only league running throughout the early winter period. I thought staying off it would be easy, I was wrong as throughout the days, my fingers were constantly trying every 2-3 hours to get on Facebook. Staying off of it on December 31st proved near impossible. 

 

The time off Facebook was also my opportunity to embrace Instagram as my new go-to platform. I now understood how it made time fly by so quickly once it had zero’ed in on what my interests were and offered me scrolling stories of things related to them. I was not an archetype of the “active user” as I was not hearting things left and right and commenting on every post. Yet I would say that I was quite active in using the platform, though mostly as a consumer and not a generator of content like I was on Facebook. Whereas on Facebook and Twitter I could express whatever I felt through just words, Instagram made words an accompaniment to an image or a video. This emphasis on audiovisual material made a passive user like me feel like I was consuming entertainment non-stop. I didn’t need to think too hard about writing something, I just needed scrolling and clicking. The biggest takeaway was that I could get news from Instagram just as I could from Facebook, but whereas on Facebook things on my newsfeed came from anywhere, on Instagram they came from things that I specifically searched and were related to. Notably, I could get very reliable news about the NBA, Football, Sneakers just because I searched for people/personalities/pages related to those centers of interests. These are images of what my home screen, style section, and search bar look like. Since I focused intentionally on solely basketball, football and shoes, I got the latest of all things related to those centers of interest. Falling on something unrelated by mere luck and thus enjoy serendipity online would have been rare.

 

        

One of the suggestions Ethan Zuckermann makes in Digital Cosmopolitans is that to experience cosmopolitanism by serendipity in our ever more “globalized” and “connected” world, we need to be aware of our consumption habits. His argument revolves around our human tendency to group with those similar to us and/or enclose ourselves solely in our centers of interests. My experiment proved to me that social platforms amplify that effect through their algorithms and end up designing for us our own echo-chambers (which we could also just call our echo-stories).
Is that necessarily a bad thing? I do not believe so. But it highly impedes that option to wander like Baudelaire’s flaneur, to go online seeking serendipitous encounters of things, facts or people, to use our connected world to further our experiences of cosmopolitanism.

 

A Stack Exchange Experiment

I ran the experiment on two different stack exchange sites. I never engaged in any Stack Exchange sites before and the only times I went on one to read up stuff was a redirection from Google. The multitude and variety of centers of interest on there is impressive. I decided to engage on two of them: Sports and Interpersonal Skills. The intro tour made it really clear that the site was solely an inquiry-answer platform, not an exchange one for chatting back and forth. Known

The day following Christmas is known in England as the “Boxing Day”; in the football world the “boxing day” is what separates the English Premier League from all other as matches are played all throughout the festive period, jammed in short intervals of 2 to 3 days between fixtures, with the 26^th December featuring many derbies. It may be obvious to some where the term “boxing day” originated from but to foreign followers of English Football, not so much. I did have an idea; however I wanted to test the waters of the Sports Stack Exchange website. I asked the question below:

 

 

I wanted to keep it simple, short, since the posts I saw on there had a similar style. I knew I could have gotten an easy answer from simply looking it up on Google, but I wanted to test how lenient moderators were with a question that despite showing a lack of effort, seemed reasonable to be asked on a sports platform with the #football and #englishpremierleague tags. When I returned on there a few hours later, expecting some answers and maybe upvotes, I was disheartened to find 1 downvote and already a suggestion by a high-ranked moderator to put the question on hold for being off-topic. That stung a little bit. The moderator’s reason however, was that, the question looked to pertain more to the realm of English Language stack exchange (see below). His explanation did not satisfy me but I decided not to engage further. Five days later, the post had been viewed 21 times and received another downvote. A quick look around at the other questions asked on the site made me realize that the site was not really active…so there was no point in engaging further.

The IPS Family

The second step of my investigation looked at engaging on the “Interpersonal Skills site. A quick overview was enough to see that people wrote lengthy and detailed questions equally answered in lengthy and detailed fashion. I used the opportunity of new year celebrations being a current happening to ask a question related to gift giving in a relationship. I detailed the scenario as much as I could, and asked three questions in the end, of which the main one was well formulated. The accompanying two were the following :

• “How do I approach the situation?”
• Is it that I am fearing to break something in our relationship?

These ended up being edited out by a moderator within 10 minutes. In this case, however, the moderator offered me to re-edit and re-add those questions to my post if I wished.

 

 

It felt really good to see that the post was sparking comments and discussion within its first few hours of being up. Within 24 hours, I had garnered 5 upvotes and someone even offered a long answer to my problem, bringing up things that I least suspected about love, one that got 10 upvotes. Needless to say, my reputation rating went up from 1 to 36, whereas it had stalled on the Sports One. People were sympathetic to a personal problem I was exposing to them and one of the first comments even read: “Welcome to the IPS Family”. That honestly made me feel like if I one day have a real inquiry, I ought to come back to this site one way or another.

I am going to engage back into the discussion it generated and see where it takes us. The reputation system point, however, is very enticing to keep us in it. What even impressed me more was that some of the moderators that commented on my post, also commented on a dozen other posts, all of whom were new, in the same day. This made me wonder how much time those anonymous individuals had on hand and question what real benefits they reaped from helping people online throughout their entire day without even being sure those were real or made-up questions. The level of depth of knowledge in some Stack sites was wowing, especially ones that had a technical component to them. It was a nice experiment and really showed me how online communities have fabricated this entire ecosystem where random individuals are both the content creators and moderators, similar to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody recounts on the power that lies behind those thousands of connected screens.

Emojis are unique. They are helping in universalizing languages through emoticons and at the same are changing ways we communicate via text. Resorting to the Unicode Consortium for harmonization of all the emojis that could exist is a useful solution that puts an approval protocol for every emoji that’s proposable, therefore discarding ones that do not make a strong case. Yet, it also comes at the expense of discarding many other creative emoji ideas that one could defend some legitimacy for.

Designing emojis that were infused of a local flavor was slightly at odds with this. As put by Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium, for each new emoji possibility, him and the group ask themselves: “Does this break new ground … or is it going to be extremely popular?” The fact that emojis are permanent additions to the language once approved, goes to show that those careful considerations are worthy of being taken.

I am from Senegal, a country home to many peculiar things I wouldn’t find anywhere else. For the emojis I chose, I decided to focus on things that every Senegalese person would recognize right away.

My first emoji was: the ‘gaal’. Gaal is the Wolof term for a pirogue, a long, narrow canoe made from a single tree trunk used by artisanal fishermen in Senegal. The name ‘Senegal’ itself stems from the Frenchization of ‘Sunugaal’, which means: Our Pirogue. Senegal is a coastal country and fish is our first export. I myself grew up in a neighborhood that used to be a fishermen dwelling, not far from the Atlantic Sea shores.

The people I showed it to recognized it immediately, the bright motifs of the little boat gave it away soon enough. Aphee Messer, who designed the “Person in Lotus Position” emoji uses a framework for emoji-creation that emphasizes one thing: it has to be something that a lot of people do. It twisted that framework a little bit in my case: it had to be something people knew instantly.

My second emoji looked to illustrate the most popular sport in Senegal: wrestling or as we call it in Wolof “lamb”. Assisting to a wrestling match is a cultural experience to take on its own as the actual combat is the end of a series of pre-events including traditional dances called “baku”, mystic baths, taunting, praise singing in the wrestler’s ethnic tongue and so much more. This plus the large difference in style and dress up is what separates Senegalese wrestling from Greco-roman-like wrestling. It is not uncommon to see anything from 4-year old kids to grown adults wrestling at the beach or at local tournaments organized in most neighborhoods called “mbapatt”.

On this emoji, I used an original picture of a wrestling contest, lasso’ed the background out and increased the contrast and blue settings to get a darkened image that resembled that allows focussing on the wrestlers’ embrace as and common silhouette as a whole. The cone-like speakers on each side symbolize the cheers and weight that each wrestler has on them as they most of the time defend the honour of their entire neighborhood or village.

My third emoji set out to be the most emoji-like in style. It is very colorful and could definitely pass for an emoji if reduced to a very small pixel size. Anyone could make out that it is a car, some sort of a mini van. That, is what Senegalese have named the “car rapide” – which translates to “fast car -. It’s anything but fast. Yet its preponderance around town has turned it into a symbol of local urban transport, almost nearing a flagship status. A tinkered and welded times and again version of French car manufacturer Renault’s 1000kg model, the “car rapide” is a moving museum, sporting many inscriptions on its sides in wolof, french of arabic that praise God or the local religious figures that helped strengthen Islam into Senegal. The insides are full of photos of star local wrestlers, marabouts, local footballing glory, even personal photos of the driver. It is a cultural experience for a foreigner, yet a daily aspect of the random urban Senegalese dweller. 

Overall, the feedback I got was quite what I expected given the lines I set out for myself. Friends I showed them to recognized them right away, though they did not expect those to be emojis; they thought more along the lines of them being images.

Whilst working on this project, I came across this project by Bleacher Report called The NBA emojis we wish we had (https://thelab.bleacherreport.com/nbaemoji/). I found them pretty good and quite related and satisfying of what this homework assignment asked. To a community of basketball aficionados, many inside references could be easily understood from them and they sort of constitute a larger ecosystem of the basketball & rim emojis that already exist in the Unicode to represent the sport.

 

Y.

From dumb to smarter: a revolution unfolding under our eyes

There’s nothing as consequential as a dumb thing made smarter”, says Kevin Kelly author of “The Inevitable”. The power of such a statement could be easily undervalued but whether you are a clearly inclined tech determinist or a skeptic of technology, that sentence should be enough of a wakeup call. To even show us that we haven’t yet caught up is that the term “cognify” is used daily in tech-heavy spheres but is not a term in the dictionary. Any text editor will underline the verb and its derivations to indicate a grammatical mistake. That is a hint of how hard it is to change paradigms: God gave intelligence to humans; humans do not have the ability to “cognify” things. Cognition and the ability to think rationally and evolve from a state of brutishness is a gift to humanity, and humanity alone; this is a mantra we most likely have been taught at one point in life and maybe still hold some belief into but that concept is being challenged nowadays on a daily basis as the taxonomy of minds keeps growing.

I am of the belief that human-to-human communication technology has reached its apex in “form”. I may be wrong a half-century from now, but here is my point. We went from sending travelling messengers to talking drums, the printing press, telegraphs, telephones, radios, television, wireless texting, live audio visual calls all the way to having the power to broadcast live from almost any spot on this earth with devices that can fit in one’s hand. This power to broadcast information in a one-to-many framework has enabled the emergence of a whole cornucopia of citizen journalists, scientists, new jobs, untapped collaboration possibilities across many fields if not all (i.e. medicine, science, aviation…) and revolutionized our day-to-day living. In pure form, what more can man-to-man communication tech achieve? The only gap that I see is for virtual one-on-one communication to not suffice anymore pushing the need to now having holograms or some technology that makes us literally feel the presence of someone we’re communicating with, regardless of distance. Simply put, instead of sending hugs via text or saying it verbally over a VoIP, can technology ever allow us to hug someone when we are at two different locations at a singular point in time. Can we reach the point where college students on a long-distance relationship are virtually able to feel each other’s touch? Can technology ever get us there? I do not reject the possibility of such an achievement because “impossible” is not a word in the tech lexicon, but I would hold my horses. Therefore allow me to change the narrative for this essay, I will look at communication technology not from the lens of cross-human interaction but from an angle of human to cognified objects communication.

If you were not already aware, social media comments and memes should have passed on the news to you by now: “they did surgery on a grape”. What? Where? Who is they? “They”, really should be replaced by “it”; a little robot named “da Vinci Xi” is the source of this entire social media storm. Doctors are working alongside robots already and getting better at achieving minimally invasive surgeries. Is this a snippet of what we ought to expect to be common in a few years? Will my coworkers be robots? Has my job in thirty-years’ time not been created yet? In this essay, I am attempting to pursue an in-depth analysis at how beyond artificial intelligence, we will be pushed to co-habit, collaborate, learn from, and maybe be emotionally be engaged with objects we insufflated intelligence to. A scary perspective ahead or an enchanting one? The bottom line is that it’s not only coming on its way, it’s here, dormant but well present.

Communication technologies from West Africa

Analysis Paper 1 Ideas

(… posted way after the 9pm deadline…)

Looking to find the methods of communication that prevailed two centuries ago in the part of the world where I come from , my leads naturally led me the language of instruments. Finding written alphabets or anything of the sort would have been rare and a surprise to me because orality was and still is to a certain extent, a major medium of knowledge and information transfer across generations.

In traditional West Africa, the griots are the custodians of oral tradition and through a family pass down heritage chain, have been trained since their earliest childhood to be destined to that role and have developed a massive memory for legends, stories, genealogies of a whole clan, stories that could have happened centuries before they were even born. Their handling of the spoken word is special and the precision and detail in their stories beyond understanding. Griots, who can be found from the Sahelian areas of Northern Senegal to the tropical zones of the Gulf of Guinea, fulfilled many important functions (from singing praises, to being spokespersons, diplomats, musicians, translators all the way to officiating marriages, namings and funerals). The importance of griots in the Senegalese society and West African communities in general, has considerably reduced nowadays; nevertheless I still employ the present tense when talking about them because to this day I see griots in every marriage, naming or traditional ceremony I attend. Géwël is how we call them in Senegal and I shall delve much more on this when writing my analysis paper because of how relevant orality was to communication in Africa [1][2].

THE TAMA

The “Tama”, as it is known in most Senegalese local languages, is a tiny bell shaped drum, also literally called as the armpit drum since it is placed there when being played. The types of drums used for different communication purposes are numerous and preponderant across many African societies and I’ll talk more about them in due time; but the Tama has the specificity of offering so much control to its drummer, allowing itself to be squeezed and loosened at will, varying its pitch like a human voice. If you’ve paid attention enough while watching the cinematic sensation of this year “Black Panther” set in the imaginary African kingdom of Wakanda, you’d have realized that the entire score of the movie has a dormant unusual and drummy background sound that hits spikes and lows all throughout. That is the sound of the Tama. Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson spent weeks in Senegal recording sounds and accompanying Fula singer Baaba Maal -who did the opening vocals of the movie – on tour while delving into the language that these instruments could speak. Like he puts it, the Tama does what no other percussion instrument does, it breathes [3]. Its sound can travel 5 to 11 kms from village to village depending on the time of the day and weather conditions, thus allowing information to be relayed at speeds faster and more efficient than any transportation system or technology of the time (~150 km/h), legitimately giving it some technological edge.

In many 20th century West African classics like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ahmadou Kourouma’s En Attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages or Hampâté Bâ’s Memoirs, all of which are books I have read, the proportion given to the importance of drums cannot be underestimated. In Things Fall Apart, the name of the drums is never translated in English but written as it is in Ibo as if each was to be given its own identity and they are talked about as living beings. The other important thing is that the drums are beaten with an incurved wooden stick that mimics the shape of a cane. From originally being a communication tool, the Tama has nowadays transitioned to become a folkloric and artistic symbol being used in wrestling contests (mbapatt in wolof), in sabaar (dance congregations), traditional marriages…most happy celebrations. It is also, along with other drums, the lead instrument in modern Senegalese music, which makes the latter recognizable anywhere as a genre called Mbalax – rhythm -.

My analysis paper will really try and research how people in villages understood the language of the talking drum, how and where they were able to learn it, and how that knowledge or that ability to decrypt traveling sounds has been lost throughout the years. My great great grandfather probably could although he must have been illiterate; I have the sense that the introduction of western-style education throughout colonization took away those semaphoric autochtonous capabilities as African kids gradually received schooling and were put away from traditional initiation.

The N’Ko Script

Connecting the scattered descendants of the Mande

The N’Ko Script is a type of alphabet and writing system that was developed around the mid-twentieth century by Souleymane Kante, a Guinean writer who invented it since there was no indigenous African writing system for his language, Manding. Speakers of Manding/ Mande are spread all over Western Africa and the artificial borders created by colonialism ended up separating people from the same ethnic groups. These borders ended up affecting how the language suffered distortions and twists depending on whether the country was Francophone or Anglophone. Those distortions are phonetically visible in how the same family names vary across countries (e.g. Dramé in Senegal vs Drammeh in Gambia) or how French is meshed with Manding in Guinea whereas in Liberia it is with English. Possibly the most known Manding character in the West is Kunta Kinte, the fictional character in Alex Haley’s Roots. The maternal side of my own family is Manding and that is why I found this personally relevant.

The introduction of the alphabet sparked a movement to promote N’Ko literacy amongst the Manding speakers of West Africa and thus through a common alphabet, strengthen a common identity. The Script has notable similarities to the Arabic script and that may be no stranger to the fact that most Mandings (+90%) are practicing Muslims and they were one of the early adopters of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is directionally written from right-to-left, has diacritical marking and its letters connected at the base. It was added to the Unicode in 2006. 

Paths of research for the N’Ko Language would be to see where the inspiration lied in the creation of the characters that make up the alphabet, look deeper into the factors that brought about its existence (orality vs writing) and the potential it has to unite Manding people across West Africa as a communication tool.

– Y.N.

Resources

[1] Communication in Africa and its Influence – Orality And Performance, JRank Article,  Link

[2] L’oralité en Afrique, an article by Mor Dieye , Link 

[3] ‘Black Panther’ Composer Infuses Score With Trove of African Sounds, A Variety Article by Jon Burlingame. Link

[4] Les moyens de communication traditionnels en zone rurale dans l’espace culturel koongo: cas du département du Pool, A thesis by Jean Claude Moussoki , Link 

[5] Traditional systems of communication in Modern African Development, 1987, Africa Media Review Vol. 1, No. 2, 1987. By Des Wilson. Link

[6] ** Mande identity through literacy, the N’ko writing system as an agent of cultural nationalism. Oyler, Dianne White (1994)  Toronto: African Studies Association.

[7] ** The History of N’ko and its Role in Mande Transnational Identity: Words as Weapons. Oyler, Dianne White (November 2005).  Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers. 

Off the technological gadgets

Embarking on this digital detox experiment was quite peculiar. I completed it on a working day instead of an off day and I ensured to take as many precautions as I could the night before starting out. I printed out all the long readings I could squeeze in, copied down my Google calendar events, read out all last minute emails and finished out any pending piece of urgent work I could have finished the next day but couldn’t afford to now. And so I ended up going to bed late, set to wake up around 6.45am and start the 8-hour against-the-clock countdown. 

The absence of technology surely did affect my experience, in fact it occurred just 20 minutes in. Morning cycling class without my earphones and Youtube playlist felt very different. Instead of songs, I listened to my breath and the monotonic sound of the bike wheels rotating, trying to rack up the miles. With no distraction, the ride becomes much more focused but pedaling also becomes very conscious. I achieved my longest ride yet so far. The morning shower where I usually have my radio blast in the bathroom felt very quiet, a silence only broken by the water falling on top of my head. And when my brain isn’t working at listening to the news or my football podcast while showering, the non solicitation of my hearing senses had me having all types of thoughts going through my head. Like Turkle mentioned in Reclaiming Conversation, taking time alone with our own thoughts becomes pretty limited without us realizing it with all the technology at our disposition; the gadgets are always readily available to take us on a virtual experience, which is near irresistible, by design. But then again, computers offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship and the illusion of friendship without the demand of intimacy (Turkle, 7). 

This non-irresistibility aspect is proven further when the author states that recent research showed that people were uncomfortable if left alone with their thoughts, even for a few minutes (Turkle, 10). Practical examples of this situation are daily occurrences, especially in instances where a person is sat and has to perform something non-intellectual, as is the case with eating. My dining hall observations of people sitting by themselves during meals made it crystal clear that a good majority end up on their phones, and some never leave their eyes off it, even when bringing the food up to their mouths. I myself ate alone at breakfast and had a late lunch long conversation with friends, both instances which I exhaustively detail in my diary entries. Using my phone in such instances is something I impose upon myself to limit and so, it was not too hard not to pull my phone, even to check the time. I got to appreciate my wristwatch. My theory about sitting alone and pulling up a phone is to give the impression, not all the times but often, that one is busy doing something else besides eating and not wasting time that could be used to multitask, even if that meant scrolling down Facebook infinitely. Alternatively, it is to not meet other people’s looks because well, sitting alone can be interpreted very differently by various people, usually not so positively. 

Finally, I wanted to zero in on an interesting comment Turkle makes that has much relevance to the academic environment we are in. She says that “these days, faculty are less deferential about the use of devices during class by clearly stating classroom guidelines at the beginning of the semester that include a no-laptop and phone policy”.  In one of the classes I had during the detox experiment, my professor did exactly just that at the beginning and has seemed very strict about it. This is key, because just like putting a limitation on when we can use our devices can be so useful in getting everybody involved and fostering in-class conversations, we each need to self-discipline ourselves to make the right use of our communication devices and still engage in meaningful human conversations and communications at large to grow emotionally and empathetically as human beings. 

-Yero Niamadio

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