Since the invention of appropriate means and technologies, communication no longer requires face-to-face meetings.
From writing and reading to using computers, expanding and exhausting one's possibilities to communicate relies more and more on the application of skills we have to learn. With the increasing importance of communication technologies, learning to apply them properly becomes a kind of rite of passage.
A Small World
From the very beginning - the first Sumerian pictographs on clay tablets - to today's state of the art technologies - broadband communication via
Since the invention of the electrical telegraph, but especially with today's growing digital communication networks, every location on earth seems to be close, however distant it may be, and also time no longer remains a significant dimension.
Threatened Cultural Memory
More and more information is transmitted and produced faster and faster, but the shelf life of information becomes more and more fragile. For more than 4500 years Sumerian pictographs written on clay tablets remained intact, but newspapers and books, printed some decades ago, crumble into pieces; film reels, video tapes and cassettes corrode. Digitalization of information is not a cure; on the contrary it even intensifies the danger of destroying cultural heritage. Data increasingly requires specific software and hardware, but to regularly convert all available digitized information is an unexecutable task.
Compared to the longevity of pictographs on clay tablets, digitized information is produced for instant one-time use. The increasing production and processing of information causes a problem hitherto unknown: the loss of our cultural memory.
For further information see
For another history of communication systems see
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Aeneas Tacitus, a Greek military scientist and cryptographer, invented an optical communication system that combines water and beacon telegraphy. Torches indicated the beginnings and the ends of message transmissions while water jars were used to transmit the messages. These jars had a plugged standard-size hole drilled on the bottom side and were filled with water. As those who sent and those who received the message unplugged the jars simultaneously, the water drained out. Because the transmitted messages corresponded to water levels, the sender indicated by torch signal that the appropriate water level has been reached. It is a disadvantage that the possible messages are restricted to a given code, but as this system was mainly used for military purposes, this was offset by the advantage that it was almost impossible for outsiders to understand these messages unless they possessed the codebook.
With communication separated from transportation, the distant became near.
Tacitus' telegraph system was very fast and not excelled until
For further information see Joanne Chang & Anna Soellner, Decoding Device,
b., March 3, 1847, Edinburgh
d. Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada
American audiologist and inventor wrongly remembered for having invented the telephone in 1876. Although Bell introduced the first commercial application of the telephone, in fact a German teacher called Reiss invented it.
For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,15411+1+15220,00.html