Communication Changes Essay

How did we arrive here? I ask that question after pondering the thought of how communication has changed near in my lifetime. I was born in 1970 in a sm all Idaho town. Party lines were still being used by most of my neighbors along our boorish gravel road, and collar tone dialing wasnt even thought of at least not in my county. Two black and white televisions were in our kinspersonone 14 in my parents room and a larger 19 in our family room. Cable tv? Not a chance. Four channels was all that was available, one of which was PBS so unless Sesame Street was on, that didnt count. That was just forty three years ago. Ouch.Writing that number makes it seem like a much longer time than it is, I still feel young. However looking back at all of the changes in the last four decades mess be mind boggling. I watched new technology arrive and often thought wow.this is it, they get out never invent anythingthat loafer outdo this. The touch tone phone, it allowed us to call someone so muc h faster than before. Soon after the VCR was the succeeding(prenominal) best thing to come into our home base and although not a communication device it would eventually evolve into an interactive communication tool. Communicating with someone in an another(prenominal) town, state, or country was restrain to either telephone or postal mail, which my grandparents at the time still commented on how amazing it was to be able to speak with someone on the other side of the planet. But it was expensive, very expensive.While brainstorming for this paper only a few methods of communication came to mind, oral, written, and electronic. During my research I found that communication technologies can be classified into eight different stages according to Walter Ong (Source Theo 2011)1. Orality (talking only)2. Early Writing (pictorial writing and then eventually phonetic alphabets, craft literacy, parchment). 3. Later Writing (scrolls then early bound books i.e. codices) 4. Early Print (Gute nberg and friends)5. Later Print (the mass market begins) 6. Electric (Telegraph, Telephone) 7. Electronic (TV and radio) 8. Digital (Internet, cell phones) After initially reviewing this run I was astounded at how communication progress was extremely slow in the first five stages consisting of tens of thousands of years between one stage to the next however in my lifetime alone I have controled the last three stages evolve. I wonder, will this happen again? Will my son witness communication evolve three, four, five times in his lifetime? Or was this technology evolution an anomaly.Fast forward to current day, we have so many another(prenominal) choices available to communicate with others it is often difficult to choose which method we want to use. Should I eMail my friend in San Francisco, call him using my house or cell phone, send him a text with an attachment of my wife and Is wedding, or would he prefer a hand written fluff sent via the US Postal Service? Not only am I fa ced with which method works best for me in these situations but I also need to consider my recipient. It is generally very easy for adults to choose the appropriate method of communication however teenagers struggle more than ever.Often they will choose the simplest form of communication for their generation texting. They even have their own new language while texting, SMS language or otherwise known as textese. This type of language is very similar to those used when the telegraph was in use over a hundred years earlier. The SMS language utilizes the fewest number of letters to produce words and sentiments in their correspondence, mostly driven by space, time and cost restraints.