This has been a question that has bothered me for a while after our last class ended, and my response to it would probably be too tech-centric. There are a lot of factors that determine what would be considered as communication like context and who the intended recipients were, etc. For now, let’s say that communication for me is the reception of a message by a party, whether intentional or not. As long as there is something to be inferred, then there is some sort of communication being made.

As I read through James Gleick’s The Information, he talks about the concept of tones being part of a language and how saying things in different tones could mean entirely different sentences. This made me think about our move as a whole society to begin using Emoji’s, in a sense they also are some sort of tonality that can now be understood differently according to the context or who the sender and recipients are.

Even with Emoji’s or Emoticons (Emotion Icons) there is a story to be retraced to define where we are now. Speaking from my own point of view, growing up with the internet understanding emoticons felt natural, much like how we speak our native languages easily. Being able to immediately understand that “:)” was a smiley face or “:(“was a sad face and not a typo of a colon and a bracket. While as someone like my Mother on the other was not able to conceive that these symbols we combine are a way to communicate emotion.

As we move forward, emoticons begin getting integrated within websites, forums, and Instant Messaging (MSN, AOL). These text symbols now start to automatically transform to a more basic version of what we now call Emoji’s upon entering them within a text box. This sort of “translation” of text into images makes understanding the emotion meant to be conveyed in a text easier for people that were inexperienced with internet culture.

Going even beyond just the basic text emoticons like “:)” and “:(“, we now have Kaomoji which are the equivalent of text emoticons using Japanese characters. These are much more complex looking characters that convey very different emotions. “ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ” This being an example of a happy expression and “( ; ω ; )”  expressing sadness. Even then unlike the English text emoticons, the Japanese have a larger variety of emoticons.

An example being merely looking at the happiness emoticons, in English text we would have around 5 different variations to express happiness while on the other hand, through Kaomoji there are at least 20 different ways of expressing happiness.

As we begin developing an understanding for emoticons, the concept of social media and smart phones starts booming which causes the creation of the Emoji keyboard, and with it, the replacement of the word Emoticon. Although Emoji offers a keyboard with a much more varied list of emoticons, and is understood by everyone regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity, etc. However, one of the main things about emoticons was that they distinguished internet users and their culture from those who were not heavily involved with it. The release of Emoji’s gave everyone the power to be able to express their emotions through text but even then the context of Emoji has become an important aspect to consider when texting.

For example, a lot of Emoji’s have been claimed to be used as memes or as a reference to something else. One needs to know their audience or recipient before sending a flood of Emoji’s because of the context of the conversation. A person using the laughing and crying emoji through text can be understood in different ways, an example would be me sending that Emoji to my Mom (Not a frequent internet user) would be taken at face value for what it is. Expressing Laughter. However, if I send the same emoji to a friend who I know would understand my use of irony through that emoji, then my message is different.

I find it to be amusing how the internet along with it’s forms of communication are ever evolving, and how the understanding of things comes naturally to one’s who frequently use the internet versus those who casually use it.

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

“Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer.”

Modern methods of communication, whether intentionally or not, seem to be quickly zeroing in on optimal ways to reward users. Corporate techniques like instant gratification and reward loops are not secrets, nor are they problematic in the eyes of users who wish for such norms to stay. Paralleling this, in its quest to understand the universe, science has been constantly expanding humanity’s capability of gathering, storing, and sharing information, with no signs of stopping. This scientific hunger for answers gives rise to technological advancements in information technology, which result in easier, novel means of communication and media consumption.

I find it hard to imagine that such a cyclical relationship between information, technology, and communication could ever wind down until it’s been satisfied. In his book The Information, James Gleick mentions that “we have information fatigue, anxiety, and glut” and that “every new medium transforms the nature of human thought” (11, 12). Taking into account the world’s rapid progress since the invention of transistors, and the negligible amount of time we’ve spent in the “Information Era” compared to the rest of human history, it’s slightly worrying to think about the unforeseen consequences of our new toys. Collectively and individually, how we manage our digital “hygiene” and presence could affect many aspects of our lives going forward.

On a more positive note, there are more options available with digital communication than ever before. It’s possible to practice some self-restraint, go fully digital, or live like it’s the 1960s. On the one hand, the constant exposure and easy access does draw people away from personal, tactile moments; or even from cultural inventiveness like the shift from the African talking drum to cellphones. On the other hand, a family like mine, spread across multiple continents, can set up a video chat in seconds. To me, it’s a matter of finding the right balance and using a communication medium when I truly need it. I don’t see the switch to digital communication as a deathblow to the concept of the talking drum, but as yet another addition to a long list of platforms, each with their own pros and cons, and each existing only as needed based on our demands as users (which, to be expected, are constantly evolving).

Growing up in the UAE within a household that had a deep reverence for Persian culture led to Arabic, Farsi, and English constantly battling for a place in my mind. I realized early in my childhood that some emotions and sentiments were better encoded in a particular language. Whenever my father would get agitated with my sister and me, he would scold us in Arabic. However, when Eid festivities were bustling, the family almost exclusively spoke in Farsi. Effective communication at home often meant using the three as efficiently as possible, and it was typical for most spoken sentences to include terms from each language. Sometimes when talking to my parents, I would even use the grammatical structure of one language and the vocabulary of another.

I never had any formal education in Farsi, and so I was only able to communicate with it orally. Because I never spent time thinking about concrete written structures in the language, I felt like I had much better control of the language as I could manipulate the structures of the words to my liking. Although my parents often spoke in Arabic to each other, I rarely used it in the household. My Arabic education, very different from that of Farsi, was instead heavily based on learning grammar, spelling, and writing essays in school. In The Information, James Gleick describes the phenomenon of the African drums that talk: A communication system that used drums not as a form of code, but a poetic exchange that included tonality and emotion.

My relationship with Farsi was similar to the way of the talking drum. I spoke the language without any knowledge of code for my lexicon, but instead a deeper appreciation for the emotion that the sound of the words evoked in my head. As I transitioned to employing this conceptual framework on technological platforms, starting with BBM and MSN Messenger, and more recently WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, I was able to find new ways of describing how I interacted with language online.

The transition between English, Arabic, and Farsi had always been very seamless in my mind, but this was harder to reproduce with written texts. And so, to overcome this, when chatting online with friends I’d write predominantly in English with sprinklings of Farsi transliterations and “arabeezy”, a portmanteau of A’raby (Arabic) and Ingaleezy (English), that describes Arabic transliteration with numbers that represent letters not present in English.

The talking drum was one of the earliest forms of technology. It was a combination of resources and resourcefulness; It used the means available at that time to increase the efficiency of communication. As we encounter newer standards of technology, we will be faced with similar tasks of combining the history and learnings of communication and the power of technology to advance how information and knowledge are articulated and discoursed in increasingly efficient ways.

There are two aspects to understand before combining communication and technology. Firstly, communication means the contribution of expression and opinion to another entity, and therefore a response either needed or not. Secondly, technology means to apply certain innovative actions to produce human advancement. These two factors in unison would later create a huge and burgeoning world where in the 21^st century, more people are getting connected through webs of influence. I believe that through the advancement of technology, communication can be a double-edged sword. Human connection and interaction have been increasingly growing at a rate that would crush the old days, however, there would come with it many problems such as rumors, hacking, fake news, and many more. Battling these problems would give out long debates and discussions that would last years, and sometimes the solution would not fit everyone’s satisfaction. For example, copyright was a huge issue through internet platforms such as streaming or downloading content. Until now, there are still providers of such services, and the act of cloning websites that have been banned or cracked down is an easy task to do with a change in some letter in the URL. Strings of influence through social media act as a huge source of communication, and because of the lack of supervision in some platforms, there can come many implications such as sending false information or manipulating people as well as abuse of power. Engaging in these issues should bring up many helpful questions to serve as a back and forth for people to contribute in. Although Connecting with millions of people can be very challenging, communication still persists in the world whether it is conveyed through one mouth or a headline in an article read by thousands. Technology has been helping communication out through projecting in different media and in larger volume.

After reflecting on the previous human breakthroughs in information and communication in James Gleick’s The Information, I can only imagine the artifacts to be left behind from the early 2000 decades, where the complete timelines of peoples’ lives will soon be evaluated to the same degree we currently study Babylonians tablets. When I consider communication and technology today, I immediately think of the emotionally triggering phenomena that occur because of the ability to disappear in the middle of interactions. The ability to have an off-switch, or a mute button between you and another individual is almost too convenient, and I argue is the fatal flaw of technology today in communication: we are now so tangible to each other that silence is deafening. I find myself both apologizing continuously for not getting back to people while also staring at the “last active” icon in What’s App. It’s so hard to gauge people’s level of interests or if they’re simply busy, and now communication includes a new degree of anxiety that originates from messaging with the fear of coming off the wrong way, or deciphering how a person actually feels on the other end of an interaction. We are left guessing the true intentions of another individual when divided by technology, and slowly we are also developing a new means of attributing emotion to messages and images, down to the suggested meaning behind adding extra letters to the end of a word.

I was left with a bit uncertainty after reading Marshall McLuhan’s comment in The Information when he describes the electric age as a “return to the roots of human creativity” (48). I would argue that the freedom associated with messaging applications is the freedom to remove one’s entire body language from a conversation. Messages have the ability to include direct emotion in caps lock and emojis etc., but they can more often than not conceal. Though a new language for reading messages has developed (where /s after messages references sarcasm, and single-word messages can come off as curt), the ability to choose how much emotion is disclosed to another person leads me to conclude that the technological era is a form of communication that is both a step above the discovery of writing, but still falls short of the creative power available to a person in face-to-face interactions.

At present, I am awaiting the discovery of a new definition of communication using modern technology that hasn’t been defined yet, a definition that encompasses the new experiences associated with technology including ghosting a person, the judgement behind grammatical errors, and the ability to confront another person without having to see them face to face. It is the growing anxiety and deciphering qualities of messaging that peak my interest in modern communication and technology, and how much excess energy is now being spent trying to understand interactions over text that likely may be easier to evaluate and understand in person. 

I view technology as a paradoxical phenomenon which already got out of human control without us realizing it. Presumably, it made many of our life aspects, such as communication, transportation, education, easier and more convenient. However, if one was to calculate the costs of technological development at a speed it has been occurring, especially intangible costs, then I believe we would find ourselves at a loss.

I must admit that I do rejoice the convenience brought by technological development, specifically when it comes to communication. Being able to talk to or follow the lives of the dear ones who are physically far away is the advantage I cannot underestimate. However, technology and technologically-advanced communication while being forceful are still lifeless. Just like with the invention of writing people lost ability to memorize well, with technology we are losing our ability to be present and connected (connected to actual reality, not the virtual one).

Even though I would not call myself a Luddite, both my body and my mind reject the intervention of technology into my personal life and the life of the society. What I constantly observe is an addiction to technological devices and the unlimited non-stop communication that they made possible. A lot of the times I am myself staying in a technological cage, waiting for a dose of virtual communication, which successfully manipulates my emotional state. Yet, I am able to recognize that this is a cage, and that somehow technological devices as well as the process of virtual communication exhaust me, taking away my connection with the world around and limiting my ability to communicate with it using my natural senses.

No wonder the happiest moments of my day are the ones when there is no phone or laptop around, but rather someone sitting next to me, present in this very moment (hopefully not partially on snapchat or instagram). At these moments communication with people and the world around occurs without a medium but with the actual senses. As Miller argues, “the larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state” (48). With technology humans no longer feel the need to have these senses as the medium perfectly replaces them. This, I believe, consequently leads to a loss of a precious ability to sense, making humans crave for a technology-created sensations.

Given that communication makes up significant parts of our daily lives, the evolution of communication technology throughout the past few centuries is vital in understanding our modern day interactions and what it means to us. The Information, by James Gleick, begins by exploring the use of one of the first modes of communication – the African talking drums, and the complexity and importance it played by transferring information from one individual to another, or even one village to another. The idea was that, as opposed to the normal rhetoric, these drums acted more than just a signal – they were able to talk and send a message. Being one of the first forms of communication, it shows how, despite its evolving nature, the idea of communication has always been constant. It is simply the transfer of information or knowledge from the sender to the receiver, often times many receivers.

However, more importantly, communication is the art of conveying a message through different mediums, whether it is through speaking, writing, or even through other technologies. It becomes a language in itself due to its uniqueness and need for interpretation. For example, Gleick refers to the cuneiform tablet as one of the most ancient forms of information technology with its distinct writing that didn’t fall under systems that were pictographic nor alphabetic. And, what is interesting about the medium is that even though you understand one form of medium, another form might be foreign to you. A perfect example, which was referred to in the book and one that I have observer through personal experience, is the Chinese script. Created almost 8000 years ago, it unifies the oral languages spoken in different regions of China through its writing. To this day, no matter which part of China you go to, if you understand the script, you would be able to read the street signs, etc. That perfectly exemplifies the medium of communication as a language in itself.

Moving on to present times, communication has gone a long way, especially through the influence of modern day technology that are the machines we see around us. The use of computers, mobile phones, electronic tablets and watches all introduce new mediums of communication for us, and eventually changes the way we interact with one another, yet the idea of communication will always remain the same. Nevertheless, it will definitely continue to evolve and impact our lives.

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. 

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A place for students in IM-UH 1012 “Communication & Technology” to post their homework assignments.