Remember when everyone and their mother was on AOL Instant Messenger? The days when you kept it on 24/7 and put every update of your life in your away message?  Like I really thought people cared when I put up the message “shower” or “getting my haircut.”  But have you noticed that the number of people on your Buddy List is dwindling lately when you sign on? It’s likely due to the fact that a few years ago there were not nearly as many ways to interact digitally with friends, family, and loved ones as there are now.  Think about it for a second.  Within the past 5 years people have so many more options on how to interact; whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, through a text message on your Blackberry, or even Skype.  I remember back when I was in middle school and first got on AIM, and it literally changed the way I communicated with friends.  There was less talking over the phone and more typing on the keyboard.  Now instead of calling all your friends individually to invite them to a party, why not just send them a Facebook invite and be done in half the time?  It is clear that the way we communicate interactively is always changing, and the concepts and changes in interactive communications were developed long before the first computer.  Here’s a brief history.

AS WE MAY THINK

Vannevar Bush published the article “As We May Think” in 1945 to try to persuade fellow scientists that a new way of communication was possible.  It was amazing to me how Bush predicted things such as hypertext, the Internet and even Wikipedia, explaining “The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk” (2).  This was all to be done with a “memory machine” that would now stands as the basis for the computer.  Using terms such as “compute” and “links” to describe his machine in an era right after WWII is fascinating to me, and I was even waiting for him to use the term “tweet” at one point.  Bush also spoke about placing pictures on a screen in which people could comment, which is basically a prediction of Facebook photo albums, if you don’t consider that a stretch.

THE COMPUTER AS A COMMUNICATION DEVICE

In 1968, a man by the name of J.C.R. Licklider followed up on Vannevar Bush’s predictions and became one of the more celebrated people in computing history.  In his article “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Licklider asks the question, “Is it really seeing the expression in the other’s eye that makes the face-to-face conference so much more productive than the telephone’s conference call, or is it being able to create and modify external models (23).  It’s so rare now that we are able to communicate with everyone face-to-face, whether it be at work or with a friend who lives across the country.  With computers and phones, however, we are able to write our feelings in text and use terms like “lol” to tell the person you’re interacting with that you’re laughing, even though they can’t actually see you.  Also in this article, Licklider developed the term “computer network,” from which he states, “through them all members of the supercommunity can communicate with other people, with programs, with data, or with selected combinations of those resources” (32). He made it clear that interactive communication consists of short spurts of dialog, and that still has not changed to this day.

THE DEMO

Around the same time as the Licklider essay, Douglas Engelbart gave a demo that actually showed a computer at work.  By showing programs that looked like Microsoft Word, and copying and pasting using a mouse, it was clear that the world was about to embark in a new wave of interactive communication.  The ability to show pictures and make graphs is another basis for programs we have today, from Google Maps to Photoshop, and are all ways that we are able to communicate digitally.  I never knew of these three men before this class,  but their forward-thinking shows me how big of a change communication has had from their time to now, and how big the change will be in the future.

So in all, it’s clear that times change. From the earliest days of the computer we were talking about interactive communication.  With each year there is some kind of change in how we communicate.  I’m sure in due time, Twitter will be a faux pas, just as AIM is becoming today.  Even the way we date has changed, as one of my classmates put it, and can be done through dating websites and relationships can be developed over things like text messages.  These ways that we communicate were predicted, in part, by the three men mentioned above. I can only imagine what’s going to come next.

References:

Licklider, J.C.R., (1968). Computer as a communication device. Science and Technology

Engelbart Demo

Bush, Vaneevar. (1945). As We May Think.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush