Communication+Technology--Progress+in

toc The technologies available for communication have grown more numerous and effective as time has gone on. The earliest communication technology was the spoken word. Spoken word was, and is, the primary form of communication between people. But exchanging information by word of mouth will generally lead to discontinuities when the information is repeated. The next technology to aid our communication was writing. The written word allows anyone to see what was initially stated by the author. The written word has a few drawbacks, it takes longer to write and read than talk or listen, and initially would have needed physical access to the manuscript to be able to benefit from it. Scribes could copy the work by hand, but scribes were capable of making mistakes, and they took a lot of time and to copy everything by hand, making their work expensive. When Johan Gutenberg invented the printing press he created a way for the written word to be produced, in mass quantities, at a cost that many could afford. And for many centuries, printing was the only was to get a message out to a large number of people in a short amount of time. But with the advent of electricity and telecommunications, access to the masses was much more immediate. The advent of the telegraph made it possible to send information nearly instantly from A to B. News and business information could travel faster, and personal communications between distant people took minutes rather than days. Building upon the infrastructure the telegraph had laid, the telephone made it possible to communicate verbally over long distances, making the whole process much faster. But the telephone and telegraph were just point-to-point forms of communication; one sender, and one recipient. Commercial radio introduced the concept of instant, mass audience communications, which was later compounded upon by the television. These broadcast mediums were integral in spreading news and information to many in short periods of time.

Spoken Word
The spoken word, as well as being the oldest method of communication, is the least reliable. This problem comes from the nature or it's storage. Spoken word information can only be kept in the memory of anyone who has heard, and is not always reproduced the same way it was heard. But, having has this technology for the longest time, we are more comfortable using it than any other method. It is the first method we are taught in our lives, and it is the only method available to absolutely every normal person.

Written Word
The written word has many advantages over the spoken word; it is more permanent, it can be transferred more easily, and it affords the reader the luxury to go back and review the author's statements. Early on, the written word had to be recorded on hard surfaces like stone or clay. Using these surfaces was very time consuming and unforgiving, which made the whole process expensive to the point where only royalty and religion could purchase them. The Egyptians invented papyrus, an early form of paper, which brought costs down, but the sheets of papyrus were hardly fit for the large public displays that the stone mediums had enjoyed. While papyrus and paper brought the costs down, scribes had to individually make copies of each work, and whenever copies were made of copies there existed a danger of error propagation. The printing press, invented in 1450 by Johan Gutenberg, changed everything for the written word. Now books and papers could be reproduced quickly, cheaply, and with little chance of error. This made it possible for ideas to travel in many directions from their source much quicker than hand copying could. The ability of the printing press to make many copies quickly and cheaply gave the written word the ability to spread news in a reliable form. Not only were all messages, that went out to very many people. the same, but now they were permanent. Readers had a record to look back upon if ever there was a factual incongruity, or questions arose.

Telecommunications
From the invention of the printing press onward until the 19 th century, the only real new technology to help communications was the same technology used to move people and goods. The faster people could move, the faster spoken word could move, And the more crates that could be moved from A to B, the more books, letters, newspapers and periodicals could be sent inside the crates.

Telegraph
In 1849 Samuel Morse was granted a patent for the telegraph, which revolutionized the way we used the written word. Using the telegraph, the written word could now be transcribed and sent over telegraph almost instantly to any other telegraph location. While the information still had to be transcribed by hand, there was now a person on the receiving end there to double check the operator's work.

Telephone
Where the telegraph had advanced the transmission of the written word the telephone advanced the spoken word. Patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, the phone took the existing idea of electromechanical information transfer, and combined it with technology of sound reproduction.(citation needed) The telegraph required two operators, the first to transcribe and send the information, and the second to receive and interpret it. The telephone only required operators to connect the call, then the two parties involved were free to converse without third parties eavesdropping on them. In time, the operator was replaced with a machine that let you directly dial the recipient of the call, creating a private form of instant interpersonal communication.

Radio
The invention and commercialization of public broadcast radio did for the spoken word, what periodicals had done for the written. Periodicals allowed the masses to get their news and information from a single source, and the commercialization of radio allowed the masses to get their information, in spoken form, from one box. Radios put access to a multitude of news sources into the hands of the consumers, for a single purchase fee, and the nature of radio guarantees that the content broadcasted will be relevant to the local audience.

Television
Building upon the the medium of radio wave, much like the telephone had built upon the telegraph lines, the television uses radio waves to transmit it's content. Not only did television improve upon radio, it took the art of photography, and movies, and combined them into a more immediate form of information delivery with the capacity to deliver much more information. For the first time since writing came about we had a new contemporary way to communicate. We could send images at the same speeds as we could send our text or speech. While we'd had art before; in paintings, photography, and films. None could really be transferred as fast as well as written or spoken words, and with television, all three methods could appear together. Like the radio, television is a medium used to get a message from one source out to the masses in a fast, efficient manner. The value of being able to send emergency information, possibly containing life saving information, in the form of a map accompanied by audio and text information has proven itself valuable time and time again by local news stations and the Weather Channel.

The Internet
The Internet has created a new purpose for communications. Where earlier technologies had been dedicated to either person-to-person or source-to-masses communications, the Internet has allowed for the former and mass-to-mass and mass-to-entity communications. The community driven culture that has grown on the Internet has given rise to more diverse and active groups than other mediums allowed. The ability to communicate instantly and semi-anonymously, with text, audio and video, has proved to be a great motivator, for the otherwise neutral citizens of the world. The current norm, in developed nations, is to have a wired connection at your home, and possibly a home network beyond your connection. It used to be wired networks were prominent, but with the increase in speeds, and the more frequent updates to standards, wireless networks are gaining in popularity. The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers(or IEEE) works on defining the standards for computer networks, and they are currently working on standard IEEE 802.16, also known as WiMAX. WiMAX will be a standard for large area wireless networks. Projects like Wireless Philadelphia are testing out the concept of community wireless networks, but on 802.11(the usual home network standards) because compatible components are already offered by computer manufacturers. Early users have been optimistic, but budget issues have slowed progress to a crawl, and the project is now under the control of private investors. Even though the reasoning behind the community wireless network is good, there are many ways for it to turn very bad, very fast. This past year, Dan Kaminsky found a major flaw in one of the base protocols of network trafficking, which could have left all users open to nearly undetectable phishing attacks had he discovered the flaw with malicious intent.

The Future
The future of communications technologies is always uncertain, but best bets right now would be anything based on personal computers. The past trend has been to just keep increasing speed of individual home connections, and driving home network speeds up along with them. But recently, there has been a buzz about distributed computing, also known as cloud computing; where the load gets spread among computers on the local network and not any single outbound connection. This seems like it would automatically be a winning idea, sharing the load for all users among all their machines. But as always with invention and innovation, whether or not a product is successful is up to the consumers in the end, and whether or not they want their personal work on the machines of their peers.