Bandwidth [0319.1998]

One of these days, we're going to find even better ways to communicate. We've got language. That gets us pretty far. Nonverbals let us offer even more channels of communication.

The written word is a bit slower, but it lasts, and we can pass it from person to person or generation to generation. Shorthand, printing presses, typing, and dictation software all speed things up.

Then there's email, networks, the web. A simple email allows us to quickly express ourselves, archive our communication, and distribute it to many people in remote parts of the world.

Someday we'll probably have free voice and video email. Heck, I got a voice email just the other day. I didn't have the technology to hear it, but that's beside the point.

Then there's the web, where not only can we SEND information to many people, we can instantly FETCH information from many sources.

Communication itself is also getting more advanced. NLP gives us tools for more precise communication, and to gain more meaning from the information we're presented with. Books like Strunk and White's Elements of Style can really help us out, too.

But the real kicker is that this is just the beginning. As technology increases, our communications improve. Period. There's going to be something bigger, better, faster, and more useful than face to face, than telephones, than email. Maybe something like telepathy.