The photograph of me looking down and grimacing at my iPhone got me thinking about how we communicate and continually develop new ways to do it. Everything plays off the prehistoric way, two of our ancestors, face to face, making grunt sounds or gesturing with face and hands or other body parts.
Creating language had to have been a very tricky business. You couldn’t even translate from one language to another because there weren’t any. I have no idea what the first over achiever screamed when he or she sat ass first on a fire, but it had to end with an exclamation point, before there even was one. I am sure there are many Ph. D’s awarded for addressing the formation of language and I will part company with academia here because it is more fun to make this shit up.
We were certainly making sounds throughout our transition from hairy four legged to being upright, gradually losing most of the rug that covered us, as our knuckles slowly began to stop scraping along the ground.
I would bet the creation of music and the visual arts preceded language. Something tells me there was no Webster’s when our ancestors were doing cave drawings. Music is a language all its own and Ella Fitzgerald proved thousands of years later you didn’t need words when you were scatting a Jazz riff.
Society and communication are woven together so tightly, I am not sure which happened first, but they were certainly in some kind of symbiotic, creation dance. The oral tradition was how history was preserved and passed on from one generation to the next. The idea of communication was no less brilliant and basic to our development than the invention/discovery of the wheel. Language created a kind of mobility just like the wheel, but much more powerful and capable of traveling millennia.
Hairy face to hairy face, eye to eye, embrace to embrace was how the most potent form of communication happened. I really don’t like quoting third party resources because it gives the false impression I have researched my subject matter. Forgive me this time because this quote makes my point and nothing else matters in any of my writing, which is all about making a point and another point after that. According to the Journal of Advertising Research: 75% of all consumer conversations about brands happen face-to-face, 15% happen over the phone and just 10% online.
After decades in the voodoo world of marketing, I am more convinced than ever the roots of communication will always be grounded in the Neanderthal world of grunts and gestures, word of mouth before there were even words to mouth. We are a complicated social species, often creating terribly convoluted methods of communication. At the same time, many of us have always welcomed the opportunity to avoid the heavy lifting of directness and technology is perfect for it.
As our numbers grew, new methods of communicating kept pace, creating subculture after subculture, trend after trend, world after world. Don’t give me the finger, I have just one other stat for you, again helping to make a point. A study released by Common Sense Media shows that teens spend NINE HOURS a day on various forms of electronic, mind dialysis, with my own choice of words at the end.
I am not fooled for one minute that the sight of me grimacing at a fucken text under the bright beach light of Tunnels is on the same communication plane as the good ole hairy face to hairy face grunt-a-thon. The circle of our so-called communication world has become so large, it feels trivialized to me and it will have to burst to correct itself if we are to stand a chance of holding our humanity in our arms ever again.