Communication is the activity of conveying information through the exchange of ideas, feelings, intentions, attitudes, expectations, perceptions or commands, as by speech, gestures, writings, behavior and possibly by other means such as electromagnetic, chemical or physical phenomena. It is the meaningful exchange of information between two or more participants (machines, organisms or their parts). The nature of communication has undergone a substantial change in the past 20 years—and the change is not over. Email has had a profound effect on the way people keep in touch. Communications are shorter and more frequent than when letters were the norm; response time has greatly diminished; we are even surprised if someone we wish to contact does not have an email address. Although there are still a few people who print out their emails in order to read and respond to them, most of us are accustomed to the daily duty of reading and answering emails that have arrived since we turned off the computer the night before, and to keeping up with them as they trickle (or flood) in during the day. Even as we have gotten used to email, though, the nature of communication continues to change. Instant messaging has created another method of interaction, one where the length of messages is shorter and the style of the interaction is more conversational but where it is acceptable and common to pay partial attention. Broadcast technologies like Twitter transform these short bursts of communication from one-on-one conversations to little news (or trivia) programs: we can “tune in” when we want an update or have something to say, and “channel surf” to other activities in between updates. The expectations we place on those we communicate with vary from medium to medium, as has always been the case. Sending a letter through the postal mail sets up an expectation of a response that will come in days; email, in hours; instant messaging, in minutes.
We expect the letter-writer to devote a certain amount of time and attention toresponding. With email, the expected time investment is smaller. With instant messaging, we understand that the other party’s attention may wander between messages in some cases and remain focused on us, as with a phone call, in others. New environments like virtual worlds present additional opportunities and challenges for communication. In such settings, there is a visual component to the online interaction that is lacking in email or instant messaging: we can see a “body” that goes with the voice or text conversation. Affordances like this can help foster a feeling of presence and give us clues about when the other person is listening, when he or she wishes to speak, and when his or her attention is directed elsewhere. This is not to say that these environments offer the same contextual cues as face-to-face communication—they do not; but there is an added dimension to interactions in these spaces that does not occur in other online contexts. Online communication tools also have the potential to increase our awareness of the movements of our professional or social contacts. Twitter, for instance, offers an at-a-glance update of things people we know happen to be doing: who is outside cleaning their gutters, who is writing a new blog post, who is about to have lunch with a friend.
Today’s inforgraphic shows a timescale of how communication has evolved over time. It’s hard to imagine communication long before the hustle and bustle of email and text messaging. Technological communication has grown exponentially, leaving snail mail to be a thing of the past. Facebook and Twitter is the most popular form of communication right now. These social giants are changing the game of communication. Today’s communication seems to only be in the form of short spurts with hashtags or tagging. Social media has taken the complexity out of communication, it is no longer organic, but short and to the point. Today’s style of communication represents the direction society a technology is headed, towards a more efficient form of communication. Clive Thompson (2007) calls this phenomenon social proprioception, named after the physical quality of proprioception that tells a creature where its extremities are by the reception of stimuli produced within the organism. Social proprioception tells us where the nodes of our community are and provides a sense of connectedness to and awareness of others without direct communication. Technologies like Twitter enable us to have this sense even when the members of our community are not within sight.
Source: (http://www.nmc.org/pdf/Evolution-of-Communication.pdf) (http://dailyinfographic.com/the-evolution-of-communication-infographic) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication)
