The new and constant degeneration

When I am thinking about something new that I haven’t given much thought to before, I like to think of it in terms to the history of the world. Like, when was the first time ____ happened? And who made ___ happen and why? How did ___ travel around the world and become so globally accepted? How has ____ evolved? The weird thing is, mostly when I think of ____ in terms of these questions, this is the graph that pops into my head:


Now, I recognize that this graph is not to scale, but I really feel like the world was pretty stable about pretty much everything until half a century ago-ish, and then things are really changing. But what I think has changed the MOST is communication. And although it’s something I’ve thought about before and a lot, here are my questions.

Like, when was the first time communication happened? Easy: Seventh day of the world existing. Who made communication happen and why? Adam, so God could tell him the rules and they could hang out together, and also with Eve. How did communication travel around the world and become so globally accepted? Well, it’s kind of important, even ants need to do it. How has communication evolved? And here’s the kicker.

In the history of time from the beginning of the world on, there were two main types of communication: Talking and Writing. People go door to door, visit their neighbors, bring some bread, write some letters. But the telegram, to the telephone, to email, instant messaging, text messaging, and so on, have all popularized as of relatively late, and the majority of evolutions have created an entirely new system of communication.

So no one is writing love letters and spraying perfume on it, instead people are sending poorly punctuated emails and not even bothering to sign their names. And no one is stopping by for a visit to check up, but instead a text message “how r u?” And now the worst of all is social network websites, where you don’t even need to talk to someone to catch up with them, just look at the pictures they have posted and what someone else is writing on their wall. I would like to see someone from the past come to the future of right now. They would probably say, “This is weird, is no one friends with each other?” Because this is what they would see: people walking around by themselves with either headphones in or talking into their cell phones or typing messages in their phones, sitting at black boxes and typing furiously, but man would it look ridiculous to the time traveler.

Something I also think about when thinking about the above graph, is how most things that have changed are relatively so new, that we can’t be totally sure about the eventual effects of this speedy evolution. The varying types of communication today are pretty spectacular, but how much are there going to hurt us in the long run? Are the relationships we have with every other person going to become more weak and superficial? Are we going to rely on emails and text messages to maintain friendships? And as the generations go on, will technology allow communication to become even more impersonal? What will communication eventually degenerate to? And as all languages evolve, the English words will become shorter and shorter because no one wants to type in all the letters to spell w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r word is t-o-o l-o-n-g into their phones. And people need to keep the cell phone conversations to a minimum because they’re out of minutes again! so they will just briefly say what they need to in short grunts and hang up.

But maybe our expectations for communication just have to be lower. We should just accept that now we can say so much more in so many less words using much more resourceful means. People would probably roll their eyes at the inefficiency of a love letter these days anyway. But maybe we should just be careful. Maybe we could start bringing our neighbors bread again. Even though it is probably also not as good as pre-mid-1900’s bread.