The History of Human Communication

The face of communication has changed over times but the basic objective remains the same. Gone are the days of cave drawings and use of drums to communicate. Now a message travels around the world by the click of a mouse. But some basic modes hasn’t changed yet….still we smile when happy, cry when sad—our emotions and gestures still communicate volumes about us. As time will progress, we will move to more and more sophisticated ways with more speedy, more secured, more reliable mode of messaging but care should be taken that our advancement does not harm our emotional bonding. The advent of short messaging service, e-mails etc seems to have killed the glorious days of the immortal letters written by Byron, Keats and Shelly. Communication’s advancement has traveled a long way……. But a longer way still lies ahead. The urge of communication between human beings began long before the evolution of any civilization. The pre –historic people had understood that in order to survive the harsh environment of those days, they had to support and rely on each other. The need for survival led them to communicate with each other. That led to the birth of symbolic language which later diversified and congregated as today’s language. They used to express themselves by facial expressions, gestures and touch. It was very basic and it did not convey everything so something more dynamic and practical was required.

Communication has changed relatively little since the births of symbolic media in the form of cave drawings and the first texts. The people at first expressed their views with cave paintings and sketches. They made pictorial depiction of objects they wanted to relate. When this was found wanting they developed scriptures which was a great step ahead in the communication history. Some of the examples of pre-historic communication are as given:-

B.C 75,000: Estimated date of geometric carvings found on rocks in South African cave
B.C 30,000: Ivory horse, oldest known animal carving, from mammoth ivory, discovered near Vogelherd, Germany

This development in pictorial writing took place till a long time in form of ideographic symbols and numerals. People wrote in silk, clay rocks, silk and finally on paper. The writing direction changed from vertical to horizontal. The first literary work was officially written in 3000 B.C in Sumer with the title ‘Gilgamesh’. In 2000 B.C Chinese developed pictographic based written language. Like this by 1500 B.C most of the important civilizations had developed their own scriptures and numerals and they were fluently communicating with each other. They were providing the future generations with their works in the form of literary novels, songs, hymns ,religious works. Some great works during these periods were Bible, Mahabharata, Illiad and Odessey.

This type of written and verbal communication went on for a long time. Printed texts also came out so message of a person was easily spread among the masses. Great writers wrote commentary on various values of life and other great literary works. They started theatres where people gathered together and viewed plays and song and dances. It was not only a chance provided for people to gather together in masses and meet each other but were also to witness some great artistic works. Plays of Shakespeare, music by Beethhoven , different classical and folk dances, to name a few, all found their birth in such mass gatherings. Some rulers also patronized these artistic works and their courts thronged with these great men of arts. Plays, musical shows and public gathering also were a great way to communicating with people and it remains important even till today.

Then there developed a systematic mailing system which was used to deliver written messages. Letters became important to communicate with people far and near and everyone was given a chance by their own government the facility to communicate via letters.

But to send a message to a person far off people had to undertake a lot of efforts. To ease the problem technology played a very important role. Thus the communication took a big leap in the 18th century with the discovery of the telegraph. It made the way for communication like never before. Codes of dots and dashes were used to symbolize alphabets and numerals and a telegraphed machine could communicate to any part of the world. This also led people to venture out more from their lands and places in search of new territories and people and places. They went to far off lands, came in contact with people of different cultures and civilizations and started interacting and developed business and social relations among themselves. After this people realized that no distance was great and they kept on revolutionizing the technology that eased communication. People were easily connected far and near.

By the beginning of 20th century, radio came to existence and live voice messages could be transmitted from one place to another. The more there was advancement, the more there was urge in the people to communicate. It was important also as business had started to take place in far off lands and every detail had to be properly informed and listened. So technology proved to be a big boon to the people. It was then telephone which made sure that even common people could easily reach out to their near and dear ones easily and so the communication gap between people began to disappear.

Communication via telephone and wireless played a great part in the outcome of the 2nd World War. It led to the foundation of a global community meant for people all around the world (U.N). Communication in this age led to revolutions. It united nation against oppressions and united them to fight together. It led to various forms of entertainments and social messages in the form of movies and documentaries. News giving information of the whole world made people aware of the happenings all over the world. These informations made them more aware and thus their personal and business decisions all depended upon these informations.

But the biggest development to take place was the invention of computers. This was a device which was to change the methodology of communication on its toes. It was able to store loads and loads of information, it could simulate datas and numbers as desired. Thus humans were relieved of heavy work load and they could store information in a small hard disk. It was only desirable when the ‘Internet’ came into being in 1980’s. Internet brought the whole world to our room by the simple click of a mouse. This made it possible to transfer written data from one place to another without any difficulty and it also was cheaper. Business got transformed due to internet. Now products and services became available to people in their workplaces and homes.

Now the development is that people have got internet right in their palms. The PDAs and highly intelligent mobiles not only facilitate telephone and messaging service but also provide connectivity to the whole world