Communicating Is Dead

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 is drawing to a close here at my home in New Brunswick, Canada and would you be surprised if I told you that a few hours ago, I read a post on a blog that said blogging is dead?

Let me repeat that last part “I read a post on a blog that said blogging is dead.”

Isn’t that sort of like if I picked up the phone and called my Mother to tell her that talking on the phone is dead? Or how about if I walked over to my neighbor’s house and told him walking was dead?

Now if that, in and of itself, isn’t already a good enough indication that whoever wrote the post is full of mongoose poop, lets travel back in time a few years so you can get a feel of where blogging came from, where it is now and where it’s heading:

In the middle part of the 20th century, animal bones and tortoise shells inscribed with a primitive pictorial language were found in the Henan province, China, at a Neolithic site at Jiahu. The artifacts are estimated to be at least 8,000 years old and are the earliest known examples of a complex written language. Over the next few thousand years, other cultures evolving in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa and Western South America all developed their own forms of written language.

In the earliest examples, the medium and tools used to spread the written language were shells and bones. In other cultures it was the walls of their homes, temples, rocks, trees, pieces of leather, etc. But the medium was usually some type of convenient surface that could be carved, etched or painted on with relative ease. In other words, they communicated knowledge, beliefs, thoughts and art by writing on whatever was around at the time. The medium and tools simply facilitated the communication.

But that doesn’t mean the medium wasn’t important. Advances in technology have certainly facilitated advances in communication, even thousands of years ago. People eventually figured out how to make mud and clay tablets where, while soft it was easy to write on them quickly and then when they dried and hardened the message was preserved. The same happened when people discovered that you could easily carve, paint and/or dye messages into animal skins and the message was durable for years to come. And I certainly don’t need to explain how paper and the printing press revolutionised written language and communication.

And the medium has advanced now to the point where if someone in Melbourne, Australia typed 140 characters and clicked an Update button, milliseconds later you’re reading that message 12,000 miles away in Canada. But the purpose hasn’t changed at all in 8,000 years – the medium and tools were developed to facilitate the communication.

I’m writing this message by typing on a computer keyboard. That keyboard enters and stores my message onto a medium, like the hard drive on my computer, the RAM, whatever and when I click the Publish button, I tell software on a remote machine to store my message there until you decide to access it on your computer or device. Then you read my message. All that technology is there to process, store and serve my message to you.

8,000 years ago you would have been reading this message scratched into a tortoise shell.

Blog software and other tools like WordPress, MovableType, ExpressionEngine, Twitter, Facebook Status updates, whatever, are just tools to facilitate that communication. They’re modern day tortoise shells.

Blogging is just a newfangled way of saying “I’m using this tool to communicate my message.”

The word “Blogging” might eventually die or be replaced, but communicating won’t. Even after we’re gone.

Someone, or something, somewhere, will eventually find our proverbial tortoise shells. How much do you think they’ll snicker at us when they decipher our scribblings and find the message “Communicating is dead?”