COMMUNICATIONS

The third side of the organizational square is communications. Communications
parallels the social side of the personal square, since through communications we
interact with others, have commerce with others, disseminate the body of human
knowledge, and learn from others. The techonomic, organizational definition of
communications refers in its broadest sense to the ability to capture information and
disseminate it to others. The evolution of communications throughout history has
been discontinuously accelerated by technology changes, the most important being
the most recent one: the Internet.

Along with the proliferation of computing, the world is experiencing an exponential
expansion of communications capability due to the expansion of the Internet.
Only a few developments in the span of history can approach the impact of the
Internet on communications. These developments include the first human speech,
the first written languages, the first alphabet, and the invention of the printing press.
In this review of communications history, we will emphasize the effect of the
mechanically printed word upon society.

It is the mechanically printed word that led to publication of more history books
than ever before, and that is what allows us to review history, including the history
of communication! In fact, before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press
in 1438, there were only about 30,000 books of any kind throughout all Europe.

Most of these were hand-copied Bibles or biblical commentaries. By 1500 (
less than 75 years later), there were more than 9 million books on a host of topics.
Historians differ on the exact dates at which historical eras begin and end, but
the end of the “dark ages” and the beginning of the Renaissance period can certainly
be tied to the advent of the printing press and the information explosion it set off.
More definitively, the press gave wings to Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (1517), and
the Protestant Reformation that influenced all of Western culture was under way.
Books, information, and education were no longer available to only the few, but
were economically within reach of the masses. There was great motivation to learn
to read, and the ability to leverage the sharing of knowledge increased like never
before.

But books did not originate with the printing press; they just became economically
viable for mass distribution. Writing had progressed through many phases,
including painted pictures in caves, stylized hieroglyphics carved on rocks, cuneiform
impressions on clay tablets, ink on animal skin scrolls, ink on papyrus rolls,
and ink on bound paper books. Each of these steps made writing a little easier, its
duplication a little less expensive (in terms of human labor), and its dissemination
a little wider. A techonomic metric for observing the historical progress of written
communication before the electronic age could consider many of the following
contributing elements:

1. Given the media and the language, the density of information per unit
volume made possible by the combination of written elements
2. The approximate labor time required to duplicate a written message 3. The material costs of the writing elements and transport material
4. The skill level required to produce writing and to read the results
To create our techonomic metric for an historical review of written communications,
we focus on the first two items from this list: information density per unit
volume and duplication labor. Why? Item 3, material costs, is difficult to quantify
in terms of today’s dollars. Exotic materials (gold, silver, jewels, etc.) were not
associated with common writing, although they were used for ornamental inscriptions.
Item 4, the skill level of the duplicator, required literacy. At all times throughout
history, the job of scribe required education, not just common labor.

Combining the information density as determined by characters per one square
foot (per page), incorporating the thickness of the page as a function of the material
and its binding, and then dividing this quantity by the time required to duplicate
one square foot of information, the historic techonomic metric for written communications
is obtained.