The thing
which makes us different from animals is communication. Communication is
inferred from a Latin word communis and communicare, communis is a noun which
means “common” and communicare is a verb which means “making something common”.
Communication is the foundation of community. Where there is no communication
there will be no community.
In the olden time people used to carve on the pillar to
communicate one another, it was a static way of conveying the messages because
the person has to come from a long distance to pillar for receiving his
message. The other way of communication used for long distance was smoke, the
people used to fire the woods and give the smoke signals while they are in
danger or at the time of victory.
The journey of communication started from the caveman, they
used to gather in a cave around the fire to share day to day activities in
their own sign languages and after that they started coding of their activities
and knowledge by inscribing it on the cave and rocks.
The problem with these methods of communication was that it
was static and localized way of communication and the only efficient type of
communication was writing. Let’s have a look on a brief history of writing.
Around 35000 years ago, the mean of communication was cave painting. The people
of community used to draw their emotions on the cave or rocks, shapes of human
faces, animals like fish and bulls, birds and tools were found in Spain.
For making the communication dynamic the next medium used
for sharing thoughts was making shapes on tortoise shell in the era of 1600 B.C.E,
Chinese started inscription on the tortoise shell for the first time which is
considered to be a first dynamic mean of communication.
3500 B.C.E was the era of cuneiform, it was a system of
making shapes look like wedges on a clay tablet for conveying the messages. This
type of communication was developed by Sumerians in Mesopotamia, modern-day
southern Iraq. Sumerians is known as one of the world’s first civilization with
ancient Egypt and Indus valley.
2150 B.C.E was the birth of literature, the king of Sumerian’s
state in Uruk, Gilgamesh the protagonist of the first poem named The Epic of
Gilgamesh that was recorded on 12 clay tablets in Akkadian language.
Between 1900 to 1700 B.C.E, Semitic-speaking peoples adapted
Egyptian hieroglyphs into Proto-Sinaitic script, which is known as the world’s
first alphabets before 1000 years from the emergence of Latin alphabets.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were the different types of characters that represent
either words or sounds hieroglyph is a Greek word means Holy writing. Egyptian
hieroglyphs dated to 3200 B.C.E and were art on pyramids.
Chinese in 600 A.D. developed woodblock printing that carved
wood into stamps. The 13th century, however, brought about exciting change in
the realm of the written word. For the first time, secular books were produced
for the sake of spreading knowledge not relating to religion. In the mid of
1400’s Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith and inventor, expedited the
process with mechanical movable type and the printing press, which gave rise to
mass printing.
In 1824 Louis Braille a French educator, invented a system
of reading a writing used by blind or visually impaired. Originally featuring a
series of dot patterns representing the French language. 1969 was the time when digital communication
took place in the world by the sending of an incomplete word “lo” to a computer
of Standford University over ARPANET (Advance Research Project Agency Network)
from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) student Charles Kline.
ARPANET was the first network to implement the TCP/IP
protocol suit. Both technologies became the technical foundation of internet.
More digital communication followed: the first mobile phone call in 1973, the
invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, and the first text message in 1992.
In 1999, the Japanese cell phone company NTT DOCOMO released
the first emojis, which was a set of 176 characters designed by Shiegetka
Kurita. Emojis are mimic human faces for all sorts of relatable situations use
with the text messages for expressing the feelings or emotions. In total there
are 2,666 emojis in Unicode standerd, round about 6 billion emojis are used
every day in electronic communication. 74pc of people in US has been recorded
who regularly use stickers and emojis in their online conversation.
In social media, now days it is noticed that people prior
emojis on typing text, sometimes the conversation is in emojis form. If we
compare the modern era to ancient era, we are using the same things, same signs
for communicating but in a modern and technological way. Let’s have a look so
we can compare the day to day sharing of activities by the caveman to the
social media for example Facebook where we used to share our activities of
daily routine. Preserving their knowledge on the rock and caves by painting or
making shapes in the ancient era can be compared with blogging of the modern
era. The shapes on clay tablet have been converted into emojis on an Ipad.
The communication started from making shapes on cave,
pillars, rocks, and ground to express feelings and emotions or sharing of
thoughts has been reached to shapes for the same purpose in the form of emojis.
