Optics from Communications

How you view your World quite possibly relates to how much World you see and hear. Exposure to the World beyond the reach of our immediate habitat tends to shape our perception of reality. What you hear, what is communicated to you and you communicate to others tends to shape your perception of reality.

The breadth of communication you receive and give out will influence the reality in which you live. Let’s look at the progression of Communication through History.

Once upon a time, a long, long ago, in a far distant era, civilization’s primary means of communication was one person talking directly to another person, mouth to ear. As long as humans have lived, they have had the ability to directly communicate intentions to each other. While earliest conversations may have been quite basic and revolving around the immediate needs of the individuals, it was communication. Whether it was the need of the moment or the intention of the day’s activities, letting others in the unit know was foundational to success and living just a little longer. Eventually, communication became more concise as both languages and symbolic depictions of thought became more organized. Remaining evidence in the shelter of cave paintings dated to 30,000 BC in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave of southeastern France record graphically the experience of man for those to come. Both the ancient Egyptians and Greeks also left evidence of early linguistic attainments.

But the most common communication was verbal as few were literate and most pictographs were limited in the amount of content, durability, mobility, accuracy of content and interpretation, time it took to create, the timeliness of that content and dating its creation – graphics do have a certain limitation to an earlier point in time and are not readily reproduceable. The beginning of settlements devoted to agriculture or trades meant that there was a local audience for the telling of both local news, and as the trade expanded, the communication of news of broader regions, other towns, distant peoples and events. Storytelling predated publication by thousands of years for communicating news, history, legend and folklore to millennia of mankind. This was before drama and art but most probably was a precursor as the heralds and town criers gave way to traveling minstrels who from the stories that have survived were as adept at enhancing their fare as actors would be in a later era. While heralds and criers would have been a village’s first line of warning of danger (fire, theft, enemies) and served as the announcers of civic declarations as well as time of day, they would continue to enhance their fare. But communication was still word-of-mouth, limited to those within earshot of the speaker.

Signaling dangers, warnings, gatherings beyond the immediate range of voice would take the ingenuity of more creative signals like artificial sound, lights or smoke. Distance would then become limited by line of sight or the loudness of the whistle or explosive concussion. Unfortunately, in the event of signal of danger, these were not private but could be obvious to the enemy.

As language became more formalized and writing came to have a more deliberate and concise content than the pictorial, it became possible to write messages on message boards – actual writing using a stylus on moist clay which would dry and harden and could be small and portable enough to carry from this location to a far destination and have the message read and understood as intended. Circa 4000 BC this was a reality and the beginning of what we think of as communication. By the 1500s BC, there were numerous written languages across the continents and by 105 AD Chinese Cai Lun had created the earliest form of paper making messages and records more manageable and easier for messengers to distribute. In southeast Asia by 600 AD copper scrolls were used.

While Gutenberg invented the printing press using metal movable type in 1440, the Chinese were using movable type printing using wooden blocks by 1305. Printed documents could be produced much faster than the hand-writing scribes of earlier centuries when any news or royal decree had to be hand copied for each document being sent out across the realm. Even with these advances, the common folks seldom had the skills to either read or write as education was limited to certain trades. It would be well into the 1800s before commoners would think of communicating with personal letters as the means of transmission was expensive and slow taking months to cover longer distances before any kind of service was available.

In 1792, Claude Chappe demonstrated the first telegraphic transmission which was decidedly not electric but rather transmitted an optical signal from tower to tower by varying the position of semaphore arms with vanes which would be read by observers at the next tower and then repeated to the next on across the countryside. It would be 1831 before an electric telegraph was demonstrated in the U.S. and another five years before Morse developed what would become known as Morse Code. In 1843, Samuel Morse took signaling telegraphically another step forward with the long-distance electric telegraph line. It would be followed with the wireless telegraph of Marconi in the last year of the 19^th Century. These early communication transmission devices were non-verbal and were in code which had to be decoded by the receiving station. Think dot dot dot dash dash dash…

Verbal communication over distance was first demonstrated by Bell in Boston, Massachusetts. The electric telephone in 1876 was experimental and would not be commercially available until the first service was offered in New Haven a couple years later on a limited line, high cost subscription to 21 customers.

The communication that did leap ahead for the commoner was the radio. Marconi’s wireless telegraph pioneered the way for transmission of signals over long distances as radio telegraphy and was the standard for distance communication for ships at sea or where landlines did not exist. This technology became the basis for Reginald Fessenden’s work in audio transmissions in the earliest 1900s with the first successful broadcast in 1906. Additional test broadcasts by others came the next year but all were limited in duration and to a limited set of receivers. Public broadcasting began in the Netherlands (1919), Argentina (August, 1920) and in the U.S. later that year in Detroit and New York. In the mid-1920s, vacuum tubes and various power supplies ushered in the amplified radio receivers and the addition of loudspeakers meaning that whole families could listen to a broadcast. The licensing of several commercial broadcasting stations late in 1920 began an onslaught of competing ventures especially in the northeast U.S. and by 1931 a majority of households in the States had one receiver. Radio became a means of spreading news as well as entertainment. Much of early broadcasting was live events, news reports from the studio or the occasional remote like the coverage of the Hindenburg arrival at Lakehurst, New Jersey which was a live broadcast of an unusual event which became more unusual when the airship caught fire while landing. Some stations produced their own entertainment and The Lone Ranger made his radio debut in 1933 as a station WXYZ Detroit studio production with creative sound effects. Other adventures and comedies followed in short order. Being the Big Band Era, live music was also a regular part of many broadcast networks. Sponsors such as Firestone, Bell Telephone and Texaco became the patrons of entertainment into the homes of America. Many of the early actors of television began as voices of radio (would you believe William Conrad, TV’s Cannon as Gunsmoke’s Marshall Dillon?). Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, George Burns & Gracie Allen all transitioned from live vaudeville to the new media of radio and then eventually into television. Radio drama became an art and no one used it better than Orson Welles with his The Mercury Theatre on the Air adaptation of H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds which was presented as a live news broadcast on Halloween 1938 and caused widespread panic even though the “news report” was preceded by the clear message that it was science fiction.

While television was in its infancy before World War II, the image quality that could be transmitted was of low resolution and refresh rate and often had the appeal of watching a light bulb flicker. Europeans and Orientals worked on the development through the first half of the Twentieth Century. By 1941, technology was available to capture and transmit more suitable images and sound but the War delayed development while science turned to radar, rocketry, electronic guidance and things more urgent. When the resources were available following the War, the Golden Age of Television came full borne in the mid-1950s. The multitude of networks boiled down to four majors by the 1950s with DuMont faltering by 1955. NBC (National Broadcasting Company) and CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) began as radio networks but made the transition to television in the 1940s. NBC had two networks serving different markets, NBC Red prestige markets and NBC Blue for lesser, but with the transition to television was forced by the FCC to divest of the NBC Blue which was sold and became ABC (American Broadcasting Company). In the 1950s, broadcasting was not twenty-four hour and typically in most large markets, the three networks would “sign off” at 10 p.m. and “sign on” each morning at 6. In the early fifties, all broadcast television was black and white and televisions were cathode ray tubes with 26” being the largest for most home use. It would not be until the late 1980s before more networks sprung up again. Although the FCC (Federal Communications Commission in U.S.) approved color broadcasting in 1951 and some local color broadcasts were in use by 1953, the first national color broadcast was the New Year’s Day 1954 Tournament of Roses Parade. But, the sets were expensive and color programming was limited and it would be another couple decades before color television was widespread. It would be 1966 before any of the networks broadcast an all-color prime-time season in the U.S. It is noteworthy that several other countries had regular color broadcasting first.

During this same time of growth in broadcast technologies, Cable systems entered the market with direct delivery of television into individual homes over cable instead of OTA (Over The Air) transmission. Introduced in 1948, Cable reached 53 million households by 1989 and had covered 60% of U.S. households by 1992. Cable carried more than the OTA networks and increased the viewing appetite of the public. But Cable was not the only option for receiving programming. In July 1962, the first satellite transmission of a programming signal was made from the U.S. to Europe via the Telstar satellite. Earth stations in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Italy and West Germany could transmit and receive communication signals via the satellite and then relay those signals OTA or Cable. Canada was the first to have DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite) transmissions in late 1972. The system used a geosynchronous satellite over the Equator to receive the uplink signal from a ground station and make it available to the downlink home receiver’s parabolic dish which had to have a clear line-of-sight to the satellite and the home dish was several feet in diameter. The parabolic dish used a feedhorn with a LNB (low-noise block) downconverter to catch the weak signal, connect with coaxial cable to a converter in the home to return the signal back to something usable by the television and amplified for a quality resolution/refresh/audio at the television. DBS made possible the transmission of communication (telephone, radio, televisions, or digital) to anyone who had line-of-sight to one of the satellites and the correct receiving equipment and conversion keys. This technology was eventually downsized so that dishes were less than two-foot diameter and could be mounted anywhere with line-of-sight to the satellite. With this enhancement, DBS provided a means for governments or anyone else with the resources to communicate with anyone anywhere. And, always and, this coincided with the advances in technologies which created the digital computer world, the internet and digital transmissions over DSL telephone circuits or Cable or satellite. This revolution allowed the development of digital cellular communication which uses either cellular towers, package repeaters or satellite connectivity to data, entertainment or any other resource which can be digitized.

Then there was Social Media. First expressed as electronic bulletin boards in the late 1970s, individuals were able to post their thoughts on forums for others to see and interact. Touted to be the Golden Age of Communication where any individual with a digital device could communicate with any other individual no matter the distance between them. Not only with email or texting but also with live face time. And not only one-to-one but to thousands of followers on any number of social media platforms. Social influencers followed by millions, even hundreds of millions of other individuals almost instantaneously.

Communication becomes largely about Optics and the appearance that what was being communicated was worthy of acceptance as information to be acted upon in the present. Communication in the digital world is almost instantaneous and does not require the time involved in former ages to compose, edit, re-think, digest and then circulate personal or social thoughts. Even “news” does not have to have an established source but rather can be generated by anyone even without accreditation or validating of source or intent.

Social Media has the appearance of Truth simply by the acceptance by the number of followers of any statement and becomes Truth by the Propensity of Agreement on what may only be opinion and not fact. Optics often increases acceptance simply by the way a piece of information is promoted.

With many of the social media sites having over 100 million participants, Truth can be influenced rapidly in the public consciousness without the original source being easily verified. Misinformation and disinformation are a couple of the pratfalls of Social Media. Facebook is the largest platform with over 3 billion active accounts and uses numerous means to try to monitor and promote ‘healthy’ use of the media but the scope is limited by the vastness of the participants.

So, Communication began one person speaking to another person, then messaging with the use of symbols or graphics which would be viewed a a single location, then to signals with light or sound where communication was between two points removed by distance. Then we had carriers of stories or messages by those who traveled between locations. Eventually, we had transmissions of signals by electronics in telegraph, wireless telegraphy, radio and on. In the current era, Social Media is Communication without personal contact so what began as face-to-face may now never become personal. Technology has given John Naisbitt’s projection of High Tech, Low Touch (from Megatrends, 1982) but as queried, how do these trends transform our lives? As is discussed in our companion website, Cowsbell Digital World, not all information is communication and volume, accessibility, acceptance does not necessarily equate intended communication.