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November 25, 2007
The Evolution of Communication
I've known Tim Bray for many years. He worked on SGML projects for us at Thomson in the early nineties before he co-invented XML and helped found OpenText.
His blog, Ongoing, is a nice mix of thought and family. His latest posting is a nice piece on sorting out human commmunication using the factors of immediacy, lifespan and audience. Read it here.
He starts by looking at our expanding options - half of which emerged in my own lifetime.
........................Age in Years (2007 estimate)
Homo sapiens...~200,000
Language .........> 50,000
Writing .................5,000
Telephone ...............131
Broadcasting ...........101
E-Mail ......................25
IRC ..........................19
Texting ....................15
IM ...........................11
Blogging ..................10
Twitter .......................1
Libraries are all about communication, eh. And this is one of the issues of our age.
Stephen
Posted by stephen at November 25, 2007 9:50 PM
Comments
Very skewed toward the present, but then the closer things are, the more details you can make out.
Posted by: Nick Baker at November 27, 2007 4:51 PM