Sharing is caring, as the old adage goes. Communication is at the heart of what it means to be human. Sharing stories, experiences, and information brings us closer together, allows us to progress as a species and keeps us safe.
Except for when it is an announcement like one of my little ones hollered up the stairs this morning; “Ma, we have no milk”. That kind of announcement will make you the opposite of safe.
Some of the landmark moments in everyone’s life are cross cultural; births, deaths, marriage. The means by which we make these announcements has changed over time, and here too, we begin to see cultural nuance pop up.
Public Service Announcements (PSA’s) have been around in the form of newspaper articles, pamphlets and posters for the last 200 years. Designed to broadcast information, spread awareness and influence public behaviour, both non-profit and governmental organisations have long used this snappy means of seeding public opinion and controlling the zeitgeist.
The fact that most of the students in my school can readily join in with “Dumb Ways to Die”, the Australian PSA made by Metro Trains in Melbourne, is testament to their effectiveness.
Town criers of old spread the word before the age of mass media, strolling the streets and shouting out the news. The Indigenous peoples of America used smoke signals. In the Middle Kingdom, as well as the town crier and public meetings, important announcements were inscribed on stone tablets or bronze vessels and then placed in prominent public places for all to see.
Even then, the capacity to make such an announcement is really quite staggering. If we think back to our most ancient fore bearers, making any kind of announcement or statement beyond gesticulation and a basic variety of grunts was unheard of. It was akin to being a tourist in Paris; point and hope for the best.
When I first moved to Spain, I experienced the same involuntary dearth of communication abilities. I needed an adaptor to plug in my iconic Nokia, but, armed with only my dictionary and my finger, I was incapable of articulating my need for an adaptor to plug in my charger. There was no way to transform my increasingly strung-out thoughts into words that the nice woman behind the counter could comprehend.
Translating apps did not exist. Apps did not exist. Smartphones did not exist. It was, indeed, the dark ages. I cried at the store attendant. She offered me a lightbulb.
As a species, we have always had a yearning for faster, better ways to make announcements. It amuses me that we spent so long inventing the telephone, and then the mobile phone, only to return to very fast letters as our primary means of communication.
Texting, or Short Message Service (SMS) messages are now the preferred means of communication, with over 40 percent of respondents to a recent YouGov (2024) survey declaring that it is their primary means of communication.
With the ubiquitous rise of social media platforms- from Instagram to WeChat to Snapchat and beyond, texting is rapidly overtaking the phone call as the 21st century mode of communication.
There are several reasons for this. For those of us with friends and families scattered across the globe, asynchronous communication is often a necessity. When I need to share a thought with someone who is more than likely sleeping the sleep of the just, I can just fling them a text. It also allows the socially anxious of us to pause and compose our thoughts before responding. There’s a paper trail, helpful for the forgetful of us; what time was the lunch? When are we supposed to meet? Where is the place anyway? All of this info is helpfully stored in your chat history.
I also have a long and varied text history with myself, almost like an external memory disc, where I store the names of books or series or movies or anything at all that I know will skitter out of my short-term memory as soon as I blink.
Another possible reason for the rise of the text is that for some folx, the mere thought of talking via phone call is repugnant. Without the non-verbal cues that punctuate face to face conversations, and the horror that is unintentional cross talk, phone calls become arduous acts of torture. Closely related to this is the arena of “things you can only do by phone”, such as, ironically, sorting out issues with your SIM card, or certain bank and credit card trials and tribulations. The emotive response to such ordeals has sullied the entire process forever for some.
This movement from speech to text seems then, to be cyclical for us as a species.
The bursts of air shooting through the vocal-chords, from a very basic growl of dislike or disapproval, to grunts, clicks and hoots, to come-hither coos served as a proto means by which to make announcements during the hominin’s pre-history.
And then, someone thought, “We can do better than that”, and around the world, language emerged.
But so thorny has the debate been about the emergence of the spoken word as a means of communication, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all talk of it in 1866, a prohibition that held strong until late into the 20th century.
Tentatively, scholars began to re-engage with the gradual emergence of proto language in the 1970’s, in a low key way. Conventional linguists would have you believe our early ancestors meekly evolved the ability to communicate over millions of years, piece by bureaucratic piece. Having raised toddlers, I am pretty certain the first word spoken collectively was “No!”.
Alas, 1.8 million years back when old’ Homo erectus was living his best day, every day, there were no means by which to record announcements of any sort.
So we do not know, and possibly will never know the first recorded announcement of our fledgling species. Perhaps the cave drawings that can be found around the globe were the first visual symbols used to announce important happenings; “There are 25 mammoths over that big hill up yonder”.
In any case, once the earliest hominins cracked it, there was no going back. Homo Sapiens, with their larger brains and infinitely more suave larynxes took language to a meta level. Not only could we now move beyond a charades-style basic needs communication, we could begin to make announcements; in the moment, nuanced, complex and ambiguous.
Not much has changed, then. Here, 15,000 generations later, we are once again communicating via memes and emojis and living our best day every day.
What will be the next big wave in the announcement preferences of our global peers? Will texting one day go the way of the phone? I can’t wait to find out.
