Whether you’re bombarding your friends with lengthy WhatsApp voice notes, posting your latest photo dump to Instagram, or making aimless small talk with your Careem driver, communication is a key part of our daily lives
Since the dawn of time, communication has been essential to the development of mankind, with verbal communication being an innately human feature that sets us apart from other species. From its humble beginnings of carving images into stone to the invention of the telephone, communication has taken many different forms over the course of history. Advances in technology and the emergence of social media mean that the face of communication is constantly changing and adapting - who knows what the future will hold?
If you’re a certified yapper, verbal communication could be the first thing that springs to mind when you think of communication, however, the development of speech didn’t happen overnight. While written communication can be traced back to stone carvings or books, speech is a little more complicated. Researchers have long debated when humans started speaking to each other with estimates ranging from 50,000 years ago to as early as the beginning of the human genus more than 2 million years ago.
Early Forms of Communication
As for how or why humans started verbally communicating with each other, some theorise that it developed as a means of teaching each other to build and use tools. While our ancestors would have started with a very basic protolanguage that later developed into the semantically complex languages we speak today, it is also possible that a type of gestural communication preceded spoken language. Next time you sit around the table, engage in chitchat and inevitably ask someone to pass the salt, spare some thought for the legacy of our ancestors and the trials and tribulations they went through just to create the most basic form of speech.
The fact that you’re reading this blog off your smartphone or laptop and not a stone slab speaks volumes about the evolution of written communication. While sentences start with a letter, early written communication started with a picture meaning interpreting them was almost like a game of historical Pictionary. The oldest known inscription is that of the Kish Tablet, found in the ancient Sumerian city of Kish and dating back to 3500 B.C. The carvings feature proto-cuneiform signs, a series of simple drawings similar to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Written Language Develops
Over the next hundreds of years, different regions adopted their own forms of written communication meaning the next logical step was to make it transportable. Long-distance communication had its humble beginnings as the Greeks—for the first time in recorded history—had a messenger pigeon deliver results of the first Olympiad in the year 776 B.C. While it wasn’t as efficient as Amazon Prime, at least it was a start!
Fast forward a couple of thousand years to 1440, when a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg invented the first mechanical printing press, which he used to print the bible. In the years to follow, the same method was used to print newspapers, meaning information could be efficiently shared with the masses.
Modern Problems, Modern Solutions
Followed by the invention of the telegraph, the next breakthrough in communication was the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. The first call he made was to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, where he said ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you’. A century after the invention of the telephone saw the introduction of the mobile phone by Motorola, it was big, bulky, 10 inches long, and weighed around three pounds – now imagine carrying that thing around!
While the invention of the Internet in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee paved the way for modern communication, it wasn’t until the developments of high-speed broadband and smartphones that the World Wide Web really took off and became accessible to the average person. It’s hard to imagine life without the Internet, how else are we supposed to stay up to date with what’s happening in the world?
In fact, the internet has become so integral to modern life that in 2016 the United Nations passed a resolution declaring access to the internet a human right. With search engines like Google, we now have access to unlimited information at our fingertips, which significantly helps us in our daily lives - the word ‘google’ has even become a verb in the English language!
The Era of Social Media Dominance
Of course, we can’t talk about modern communication without mentioning social media. MySpace became the first social media website to reach 1 million monthly users, paving the way for other social media sites such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, X, and TikTok, giving users a platform to share stories and connect with friends around the world. From Huda Kattan to Khaby Lame, the birth of the modern-day influencer saw a new type of celebrity emerge and a new medium for advertising reaching a wide demographic of consumers.
Communication has come a long way from stone carvings to social media, continuously evolving to meet our ever-changing needs. The next time you upload a story to Instagram or repost a relatable TikTok, take a moment to appreciate the incredible journey of human communication. Who knows? Maybe in a few decades, we’ll be reminiscing about the quaint days of texting and sending voice notes as we teleport messages via some futuristic tech. Until then, keep yapping, typing, and posting—after all, it’s what makes us human.
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