What does Communication and Technology mean to me?

I would have answered this question much differently did I try to do that before reading the first two chapters from James Gleick’s “The Information.” My answer would have probably focused on technology enabled a wider and more spontaneous way of communication between people from all backgrounds. However the framework that Gleick offers in his book expands my thoughts on the topic.
Gleick starts off by fast forwarding to Claude Shannon and the birth of information technology, revealing that the smallest unit of information is the bit (and this shouldn’t strike anyone as a surprise who were born after the 1970s). Then, after introducing the most necessary definitions, such as redundancy, the amount of information (H) and the idea of symbols (s), and lets Ralph Hartley sum it up with H = n * log s, where n stands for the number of messages. 

Gleick introduces many technologies for communication, notably the African talking drums and writing. The African talking drums represent a good illustration on how a medium influenced the message: the built in redundancy for the way of communicating with such little symbols brought about a whole new way of phrasing sentences and expanding on simple words just so they became intelligible. However the first argument against and for emerging technologies is almost best illustrated by the argument for and against written literature.

I think this is where we can also draw a parallel between the yesterday and the now. Today we process written text in a profoundly different way than our ancestors did. We are no longer constrained by resources such as paper or ink. If we take instant messaging (such as Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp) as an example, then we see that the abundance of space to write was able to create the illusion that we can write messages as long as we want to, but at the same time the communicators use this space inefficiently. Not confined by space the people participating in a conversation no longer need to mind being concise and less redundant. This lack of concise way of exchanging information is also the result of the reliability of instant messaging. No longer do we write letters, and thus feelings or thoughts that deserve to be expressed in a longer format are absent from our lives. 

But just like the question whether Thomas Hobbes or Walter J. Ong was right about the oral and written literature, I think it’s not an easy question to decide where Instant messaging will fit into human communication and how it will be able to contribute to conveying meaning between people. We are probably yet to see the benefits of it – and how this new medium is able to show us what communication is really about.