What if phones and the internet had never been invented? How different would our lives be today? How would we access information? What would we use to communicate with people?
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Communication has changed and evolved throughout history and is still changing now. Today we have phones which we use to communicate using text messaging or other forms of online communication. In the past people relied on ways such as smoke signals, telegraph messages, pay phones and written letters.
Past
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Communication has been important and been accomplished in many different ways throughout the past.
When we think of early forms of communication, most of us think of cave paintings. The first visual evidence dates back over 30,000 years to paintings in France from the Palaeolithic era. People drew their day to day lives on the walls of their caves to help new generations live a full life.
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The Chinese took this idea and began to carve symbols and words into stone as another way of storytelling and passing down knowledge. Only 5,000 years ago we moved on from symbols and drawings to letters and words; now what does that say about the human race as a whole.
Smoke signals are one of the oldest forms of visual communication.
They were first used in 200 BC along the Great Wall of china.
Soldiers stationed along the Great Wall would alert each other of an oncoming enemy attack by signaling from tower to tower.
They were able to transmit a message as far as 750 km in a few hours.
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Nowadays we can send a long message in a number of seconds but back then this was a valuable way of communicating.
Letters and different written forms of messages were one of the main forms of communication and way of gaining knowledge about what was happening in the world.
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The pony express was a mail service used across the United States of America many many years ago. The delivered lots of messages from telegrams, newspapers to letters and small parcels.
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Today we barely get written forms of messages besides junk mail and the occasional handwritten letter from grandma living overseas.
Pigeons haven’t always been an accessory to food stalls or pesterly pecked at your
feet while you are enjoying a meal.
Pigeon post was a form of communication first used by the romans more than 2,000 years ago.
They would be sent to their destination where they could be given a response to fly back with.
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Carrier pigeons also played a pivotal role in WWI and WWII.
They delivered vital messages that helped save the lives of civilians and soldiers.
One bird ‘GI Joe’ was even awarded the Dicken Medal for bravery for saving over 1,000 British soldiers in WWII.
I Know!? Today when we think of pigeons we think of disease carrying birds but back then they helped many people
Near past
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After this early stage of connecting with people the way we sent messages developed hugely and changed the way we communicated forever.
Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph message in 1844 from Washington D.C to Baltimore Maryland.
They were sent as electrical signals, also known as Morse code.
A Morse code which is widely is S.O.S.
SOS is expressed as three dots, three dashes and three dots.
Morse code is basically just an assortment of dots and dashes for every letter of the alphabet.
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These telegraph messages revolutionized long distance communication and paved the way for the development of the telephone and the internet, which are two things that nowadays we rely on so much.
The first text message ever sent was in 1992, this is called SMS.
SMS stands for short message service. You can send up to 160 characters at a time. 160! Yes, 160.
The first message read ‘Merry christmas’ and was sent to the CEO of Vodafone.
Now over 8.6 trillion are sent a year.
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I’ll bet everyone of you has sent at least 5 text messages this morning.
Nowadays
The internet brought to us many different revolutionary ways to communicate with people almost instantly. Nowadays we can send messages and receive reply’s in a matter of seconds which is a massive change to what it used to be like in the past.
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Think about it, many of our parents when they were our age didn’t own cell phones and instead had to communicate with landlines or pay phones. Sometimes they even had to wait hours until they saw their friends the next day at school to share the hottest gossip they heard.
There are many advantages as well as disadvantage to the way we communicate now compared to the past.
For example now it's easy to get fixed behind a screen and avoid talking to people face to face. Today, people are less likely to form relationships face to face and instead rely on this tiny device we keep in our pockets all day, everyday. It is easy to hide behind our screens and disengage from reality.
In the past people would send handwritten letters that actually meant something whereas today we don't even type ‘okay’ out in full.
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The new ways we communicate have also lead to some good changes. Now we can find out what is happening around the world as it occurs and we can stay connected with friends and family who we don't see everyday.
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So what do you think? Was it better in the past, with heartfelt and personal handwritten letters? Smoke signals, and telegraph messages? Or do you prefer the present, with our millions of ways to communicate with people, but the threat of being stuck behind your screen unable to connect with the real world?
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Was it better then or now?