January 3, 2007...........A Short History of Communication

Originally, man's face to face communicating was of course done in "real" time. There was no time shifting or space shifting greater than allowed by the speed of light and of sound. However, man soon found that he had a memory and an aptitude for learning that is more sophisticated than an animal's basic instincts, thereby allowing him to intentionally transfer knowledge across time and space. Then along came his invention of writing, the first "store and forward" system; at the cost of full assurance regarding identity, privacy, and integrity.

In pre-Internet times man learned to store far more than written language. All of his senses were given a medium for time-shift and space-shift communication... technologies of radio, sound recording, photography, and film making were developed to challenge the limits of time while telephony broke down the barriers of space; all at further cost of assurance regarding identity, privacy, and integrity.

In the modern era, email led the first wave, the web led the second wave. Boundaries continued to fall; platforms, hardware, geography, geopolitics, language, economy, and time. And now we come to the third wave..... integrated borderless communication; instant messaging that can function as store and forward messaging like email, group conversations that mimic the "reality" of face to face meetings, real time voice communication mixing with real time text and real time video, file sharing of stored media mixing with streaming and screen sharing. And the assurance of identity, privacy, and integrity has become all the more tenuous.

Some technologies are more up to the challenges than others. Stay tuned.