Back to Stone Age

When Morse code was invented- America changed forever, as telegraphy was one of the biggest boons for the Americans. Telegrams flying across major cities helping the American economy, ease of doing business and huge facility for common American citizen to live a better coordinated life. There was no great hurry and life was easy going and a letter with an average travel time of a week was quite an acceptable norm those days. Telegrams were much faster and were used for urgent matters- business, good news or to convey someone’s demise. It was charged per character in most cases. The speed of transmission was as good as speed of operator operating morse code machine! 
Skilled operators, called telegraphers, could transmit Morse code messages faster than regular typists in some cases -- up to 84 words per minute, although about 30-35 words per minute was the average.

The next better communication system was a teleprinter which survived for a long time. Landline teleprinter operations began in 1849 when a circuit was put in service between Philadelphia and New York City. This was easy to operate like a typewriter and communication was in real time. It proliferated fast to spread across the United States and then across continents. The speed here was approximately fifty bauds equivalent to 50 bits per second which was a great leap forward those days. You didn’t require a Morse code operator, any typist would do the job easily- user-friendly.

As communication technology improved exponentially, very soon digital communication hit the scene and coupled with optical fibre the speeds reached humungous levels. The average fibre internet connection speed is around 1000Mbps, about 10 to 20 times faster than the cable speed. This means both upload speeds and download speeds are radically improved, taking a few seconds to transfer large files with fibre internet, whereas copper would take you minutes to hours.

Way of communication evolved over decades

During the times of morse code and teleprinter one had to be very brief if not miserly with choice of words in forming sentences as brief as possible as every character costed a lot of money to push across the circuits. The armed forces those days standardized the abbreviations so that conservation of communication resources- that were very expensive- could be exercised. Therefore, every officer or soldier was trained for this format which was issued as a military writing pamphlet to be followed in letter and spirit.

For instance, a company was abbreviated to Coy, a battalion as Bn and night as ni, operations as Ops. It made lot of sense back then.

Even a telegram sent by a civilian meant being frugal.

A joke goes around that in a small hotel in a village a waiter by name of ‘James’ is involved in raping the washer women and escapes. The manager wanted to send a telegram to the owner of the hotel who lived in a far of city. The telegram read something like this: -

“James goes nuts screws washers and bolts”!

The present state of the technology

Today we are so used to speeds of 100MBPS data speeds on channels that sending pictures and even videos are very common.

As bandwidth became surplus, computers became communicators rather than machines that calculated. Communications were taken for granted- almost free. User had so many options on mobile, internet. Wi fi made the experience seamless and one could do anything in the trick book on the go. It eventually became an information overload resulting in human digital fatigue.


Man can quickly adapt. Too much food and fat resulting in fasting- Kito diet, intermittent fasting, low Kal diet, salads and nuts, hi protein bars and jars, diet consultants and the list goes on. Too much information and lack of time on the other hand meant data fasting or data shrinking- too much of anything is bad. So, hello became hi and text was txt, as soon as possible became ASAP, good morning became GM, laugh out loud was ‘lol’ thanks was Tx! You did not have time to say thanks. And of course, brother was bro- tx bro.

The next level of lethargy – oops creativity- was invention of emojis.

Shrinkology

In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese creative artist created 176 emoji to be used on mobile platforms.
An emoji is a Japanese word for a logogram or a smiley embedded in text to fill in emotional cues to make communication more lively and also represent words. Emojis exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals and nature.

Therefore, a thumbs-up emoji meant I agree. So, you came down to textual imagery!

Caveman’s communication

Historically pigmentation or colours were used to distinguish things like tribes or groups around 350,000 years ago. That must have been starting point of human understanding and conveying something. Then arrived symbols. A hand mark could mean “I was here”? Negative hands, or the negative image of a handprint, are one of the oldest signs to appear in caves, and they were most popular during the earlier part of the Ice Age -between 22,000 and 40,000 years ago. A table-like thing of 32 signs including spirals, asterisks and dots was documented by a person called Von Petzinger- Genevieve von Petzinger is a Canadian paleoanthropologist and rock art researcher.

By around 8,000 years ago, humans were using symbols to represent words and concepts. True forms of writing developed over the next few thousand years. Cylinder seals were rolled across wet clay tablets to produce raised designs.

Time convolution

Going back to modern inventions or contemporary history of science, man had all the time a century ago but had to convey in as briefly as possible his message in order to push it on a slow system like morse code telegraphy. Today you have massive communication bandwidth but have no time to communicate or create larger message- a dichotomy of evolution. From stone age- a cave man communicating with symbols the modern man with gigabits at his fingertips is back to symbols- emojis and smileys.