As described in the previous article, communication technologies compressed time and space, creating shared experiences across vast geographic and historical dimensions.
Innovation through Constraints
Throughout history, we observe a pattern where new communication methods emerge precisely to overcome the constraints of their predecessors.
Consider how clay tokens addressed the fundamental limitations of memory in oral accounting. Early Mesopotamian merchants couldn’t rely solely on memory for complex transactions, so they developed physical tokens to represent goods and quantities, creating the first external accounting system.
The complexity of pictographic writing systems created its own constraint: mastery required years of specialized training, limiting literacy to a small elite. The brilliant solution? Alphabetic writing dramatically reduced the number of symbols needed to represent language. Instead of memorizing thousands of pictographs, people could now learn just a few dozen abstract symbols representing sound. Literacy became something attainable for merchants, craftspeople, and eventually even common citizens.
The development of printing technologies directly addressed the inefficiency and error-prone nature of hand-copying manuscripts. Gutenberg’s innovation of movable type responded to the bottleneck created by monastic scriptoria, where producing a single Bible might require years of painstaking labor. Printing increased production speed and standardized texts, reducing copying errors that accumulated through generations of manual reproduction.
Electronic media emerged to overcome the distance limitations inherent in physical message delivery. Telegraph, telephone, and later radio and television overcame distance constraints, enabling near-instantaneous communication across vast spaces. Yet these technologies introduced new constraints: broadcast media operated primarily in a one-to-many model, limiting audience participation.
Digital networks addressed this constraint by enabling many-to-many communication and democratizing content creation. Anyone could become both a producer and a consumer of content. However, this solution generated its own problem: information overload.
As digital content production exploded beyond human ability to filter and comprehend, nowadays AI has emerged to summarize, translate, and prioritize information streams that would otherwise overwhelm our cognitive capacity. Yet even this solution brings new constraints. Job security, algorithmic bias, and the risk of delegating too much of our thinking to machines are real dangers that will undoubtedly have to be overcome by us and our future generations with a new communication technology.
This recurring pattern reveals something profound about human communication. Each solution solves an old problem while inevitably creating new issues, driving continuous innovation. Rather than reaching some final, perfect communication system, we seem destined to keep evolving.
The communication constraints are moving across multiple axes, but some seem to be bubbling up more than others:
- Accuracy: How faithfully is meaning preserved?
- Memory and Permanence: How do we preserve information beyond individual recall?
- Power and Exclusion: Who controls access to communication systems? Who is systematically marginalized?
- Reach: How widely can a message travel? How quickly can information move?
And so, instead of a chronological, linear march ahead, communication technologies innovations have more of a spiral movement, always pushing forward while circling back in time to address challenges from different angles.
But at every step, we will need to be mindful of how a society chooses which communication constraints to address based on its values, power structures, and perceived needs (selective innovation). Consider how different civilizations approached writing systems. The Mesopotamians developed cuneiform primarily for mercantile purposes. In contrast, ancient Egyptians created hieroglyphs with eternity in mind. Later in the article, we will see other examples of selective innovations.
Accuracy versus Reach
The history of communication is, at its core, a tension between reach and accuracy, a recurring theme that shapes not only how we connect but also what we understand. Oral communication provided high fidelity in small groups but risked distortion over distances. Writing systems expanded their reach but narrowed access as they required specialized literacy skills. Printing dramatically increased reach while standardizing content. But, even as printing increased reach and reduced copying errors, it introduced new forms of distortion: typographical mistakes, editorial choices, and the risk of mass-producing misinformation. Suddenly, a single pamphlet could ignite a Reformation or a revolution. With the advent of the telegraph, radio, and television, communication became nearly instantaneous. Yet, radio propaganda during World War II, for example, reached millions but often manipulated reality, exploiting the very speed and scale that made these technologies revolutionary. In the digital era, we have maximized reach (shares, likes, comments, retweets, viral algorithms).
Of course, there is a natural trade-off between reach and fidelity. And thus, we have the phenomenon of “context collapse”: “the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context“. The collapse of context is both a technical and a cultural phenomenon, as information is stripped of the cues that once anchored it to a specific audience. What was intended for the eyes of a closed circle in the olden days is now accessible to millions. This phenomenon often results in misunderstanding and backlash when messages are interpreted outside their intended frame.
Sociologist Erving Goffman anticipated this modern challenge, identifying the importance of “audience segregation” in human interaction. Goffman approached social studies from a dramaturgical point of view and observed that individuals naturally play different roles for different audiences.
We are all just actors trying to control and manage our public image, we act based on how others might see us.
Erving Goffman ― The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
But if this segregation of audience fails,
We have then, a basic social coin. With awe on one side and shame on the other. The audience senses secret mysteries and powers behind the performance, and the performer senses that his chief secrets are petty ones. As countless folktales and initiation rites show, often the real secret behind the mystery is that there really is no mystery; the real problem is to prevent the audience from learning this too.
Erving Goffman ― The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Now, in the generative AI era, the reach of communication extends further still. AI-generated text, images, and video can be produced at a scale unimaginable even a decade ago. But what about fidelity? AI systems, trained on vast and imperfect datasets, are prone to “hallucinations”, plausible but false information.
With all these challenges, how did cultures develop trust systems and contextual markers to maintain fidelity and authenticity at scale?
In Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE, cylinder seals rolled over clay tablets authenticated agreements. Egyptians used scarab-shaped seals for papyrus documents, while medieval Europeans relied on wax seals to authenticate documents and ensure they hadn’t been tampered with in transit.
More complex authentication systems emerged over time. Some medieval seals used counter-seals, where the seal and a smaller counter-seal would be kept by two different individuals, to double-check the authentication. This created an early form of multi-factor verification.
Encryption emerged as another ancient authentication method. From non-standard hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs to Spartan scytale, cryptography allowed sensitive information to travel while remaining accessible only to intended recipients.
As print culture flourished, newspapers and pamphlets included mastheads listing responsible editors and publishers. This transparency allowed the public to hold individuals accountable for content. The rise of journalism as a profession brought with it norms of verification, editorial oversight, and fact-checking-cultural mechanisms designed to bolster, more or less, information integrity.
Nowadays, digital signatures, based on asymmetric cryptography, serve as the modern equivalent of wax seals. Two-factor authentication mirrors medieval counter-seal systems. Of course, these methods are not enough in our hyperconnected and hyperscaled world. Deepfakes can simulate trusted voices and faces. AI-generated content can mimic established writing styles. So, what remains constant despite technological change is that we need to perpetually create trust signals that are harder and harder to forge.
From an anthropological point of view, high-context and low-context cultures are a good framework for distinguishing priorities in communication (see selective innovation). Anthropologist Edward T. Hall introduced this theory in his 1959 book “The Silent Language” while working at the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department, where he observed various intercultural exchanges.
High-context cultures (like Japan) emphasize implicit meaning and contextual understanding. These cultures rely heavily on non-verbal elements, relationships, and shared understanding to convey precise meaning. The Japanese concepts of honne (true feelings) and tatemae (public façade) involve communicating while maintaining a reasonable distance between their genuine thoughts and public expressions (see Goffman). Or consider the Japanese practice of bowing (Ojigi), a deeply ingrained cultural practice with various forms depending on the situation. The depth and duration of the bow communicate different levels of respect or formality.
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- Eshaku (15° bow): Used for casual greetings among peers
- Keirei (30-45° bow): For formal business settings or showing respect to superiors
- Saikeirei (45°+ bow): Reserved for highly solemn occasions or showing utmost respect
In contrast, low-context cultures (like many Western societies) prioritize reach through explicit, direct communication. Say what you mean and mean what you say. These cultures prefer direct verbal instructions (“Could you please close the window?”) rather than implicit hints (“It’s a bit chilly in here”). Or when someone from a low-context culture like Germany or the United States says “no” to an offer of food or drink, they genuinely mean no. Unlike in high-context cultures, where refusing might be a polite formality, expecting repeated offers, a single refusal in low-context cultures is typically taken at face value.
The Paradox of Context
Every leap in communication technology, oral, written, printed, broadcast, digital, or AI, forces a trade-off between the depth of context and the breadth of reach. As communication systems expand their reach, spanning geographies, cultures, and audiences, the contextual cues and specificities that anchor meaning are inevitably diluted. We want to communicate with everyone, but we also need to be understood precisely by everyone.
Thus,
The broader the audience, the thinner the context.
Memory and Permanence
The urge to pass knowledge forward, to make sure that what one person knows can outlast a lifetime, may be one of our most human instincts (see Tracing the Reach of Storytelling, the ‘Warning Example’). But history is full of reminders that memory is fragile, and that the chain of transmission can snap in an instant.
Consider the Egyptians, and how for over a millennium, nobody could read what the Egyptians had written (see part 1). Until Jean-François Champollion stumbled on the Rosetta Stone, and the world got a second chance at Egyptian memory. But how much was lost in the meantime?
This is a dramatic example, but the truth is, every society faces the same problem. How do we keep knowledge alive, especially when the tools for storing it keep changing? Oral traditions worked for millennia, but memory fades and storytellers die. Writing helped, but paper burns, and not every story gets written down. Our emails and photos risk disappearing with the next forgotten password or obsolete format.
And then there is the question of choice, as not everything gets saved.
Information curation has always been a battleground for control. Medieval monks copied what they thought mattered, while folk tales and heresies were left to rot. Today, algorithms decide what rises to the top of our feeds. The act of selecting, preserving, and disseminating knowledge is inherently biased.
The pace of change only accelerates. It once took thousands of years to move from spoken word to written script, centuries more to reach the printing press, and just decades from the telegraph to Twitter. Now, in the time it takes to finish a cup of coffee, we might respond to emails, send photos, start a video call, write messages, read online newspapers. We engage in more forms of communication in a few minutes than our great-grandparents did in a year or a lifetime.
The Paradox of Total Memory
We live in an age of unprecedented information density. Because we now have more data in a single smartphone than the Library of Alexandria, we can create digital archives so vast that finding meaning within them requires yet more technology. This abundance doesn’t necessarily lead to better knowledge preservation or understanding. We struggle more than ever to separate signal from noise, distinguishing what deserves preservation from what deserves forgetting. Borges tells us that for memory to be useful, it must be selective. Because what matters most is not just how we save information, but how we keep asking the question: what do we want the future to remember?
Thus,
The fuller the archive, the drier the meaning.
Power and Exclusion
Communication technologies have reinforced existing power structures while occasionally disrupting them. Even as technologies evolve, patterns of exclusion persist along lines of class, gender, race, disability, and geography. The democratizing potential of each new communication medium is clashing with unevenly distributed access.
The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
Consider the evolution of writing, which required specialized skills, restricting access to a literate elite. The Sumerian scribe, the Egyptian priest, the Chinese scholar, the Irish monk, the Arab calligrapher – each became a gatekeeper, ensuring that what was written was both durable and, paradoxically, exclusive.
After all, how does one maintain absolute control over another human being? How is control then scaled and preserved over millions of people across vast territories? One approach is to control what a person knows and how they think, and to create systems where only a select few can read and write the rules. Those who hold communication channels shape narratives, determine which voices are amplified, and control how information flows through society.
Perhaps no example illustrates this more starkly than the 1830s anti-literacy laws when North Carolina’s legislature passed a law explicitly criminalizing the teaching of enslaved people to read or write, claiming literacy had “a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce insurrection and rebellion.” Such brutal enforcement was required because literacy offered enslaved people tools of resistance: to write narratives exposing slavery’s brutality, to organize resistance through written communication, or to forge documents like passes or free papers, aiding escape attempts.
Yet wherever communication technologies have been imposed, resistance has emerged. As Professor Calestous Juma notes, “People do not oppose technologies simply because they are new or because they are ignorant. They resist loss.” Loss of material resources, cultural identity, or autonomy.
This resistance takes many forms. Indigenous communities have developed what scholars call “strategic illiteracies”, purposeful refusals to adopt imposed communication technologies that threaten cultural survival. Historically, such resistance can be traced to colonial encounters, where literacy in the colonizer’s language was often enforced as a tool of assimilation and control. In the digital age, strategic illiteracies persist and evolve. Some groups are cautious about adopting modern technologies such as mobile apps, smart home devices, wearables, or AI systems, wary of surveillance or data loss.
Ultimately, strategic illiteracies challenge the assumption that technological literacy is always a universal good.
But one specific category of people stands out as being marginally excluded throughout most of recorded communication history. Women. Access to literacy and formal education has been unevenly distributed between men and women. Official histories, religious texts, and philosophical works predominantly captured male experiences and concerns. Even when women gained access to literacy, their education often differed substantially from men’s, focusing on domestic management rather than the broader education offered to their brothers. When half of humanity is absent mainly from creating and preserving cultural knowledge, historical records inevitably reflect a partial perspective. And yet, from Enheduanna (circa 2300 BCE), the world’s first known author, to Japan’s Murasaki Shikibu (1000s), who wrote the world’s first novel, to Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 for her oral microhistory books, women found ways to contribute to written culture despite institutional obstacles.
While significant progress has been made, gendered access to education persists in various forms today. According to UNESCO, two-thirds of the world’s 754 million illiterate adults are women. In regions experiencing conflict or economic hardship, girls are often the first to lose educational opportunities.
After all,
Scientia potentia est. Knowledge is power.
The Paradox of Democratization
Each new communication technology has promised greater democratization of knowledge, but each has also created new forms of exclusion. When printing presses spread across Europe after Gutenberg’s innovation, they dramatically increased access to written materials. Yet this same technology strengthened colonial expansion, with presses established by European settlers producing texts that supported colonial ideologies while suppressing Indigenous knowledge systems. There is a paradox of democratization at play. The same platform connecting distant relatives can surveil citizens; the same network distributing knowledge can spread misinformation.
Thus,
Communication technologies simultaneously enlighten and exclude.
Conclusion
Communication technologies rarely follow a simple linear progression where new forms completely replace the old. Instead, they create complex ecologies where multiple systems coexist and interact. Consider the experience of watching a foreign film: we simultaneously process the actors’ gestures, listen to unfamiliar speech sounds, and read subtitles in our native language.
This pattern of coexistence has been the norm rather than the exception. Oral traditions persisted long after writing emerged, adapting their role rather than disappearing. When literacy was limited to elites, storytelling remained most people’s primary mode of cultural transmission. Even today, with near-universal literacy in many societies, oral communication continues to serve vital functions that written text cannot replace.
This intermingling extends to specialized communication systems that defy simple categorization. American Sign Language, for instance, possesses the grammatical complexity of spoken language but operates in visual space. Morse code translates alphabetic writing into patterns of sound or light. HTML and other programming languages communicate instructions to machines while remaining partially readable to humans.
But, as communication systems have evolved, they have also moved toward greater abstraction in representing ideas. Cave paintings depicted concrete objects with direct visual resemblance. Early pictographic writing stylized these representations while maintaining visual connections to their referents. Alphabetic systems took a revolutionary step toward abstraction by representing sounds rather than objects or concepts. This trajectory toward abstraction continues in the digital age. Emojis function as emotional shorthand rather than direct representation.
Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual artwork “One and Three Chairs” (1965) elegantly illustrates this spectrum of abstraction. The piece presents three representations of a chair: the physical object itself, a photograph of that chair, and the dictionary definition for the word “chair.” Each representation becomes progressively more abstract, from the concrete three-dimensional object to the two-dimensional image to the purely linguistic definition.
Each communication system carries the DNA of its predecessors, an inheritance that comes with the possibilities and limitations of all that came before. Now that we have seen the recurrent themes in the history of communication, we may be more equipped to predict what could come next in communication.