Week 2: Key moments in communication history.

Spoken word seems to be a good place to start as far as key moments in communication history, however since nobody has figured out exactly when that first started there's not much I can say about it. The next would have to be Cuneiform writing and Egyptian Hieroglyphics, these first primitive forms of written communication provide the building blocks for the development of the Phoenician alphabet, the first wide spread phonetic script. Written communication is perhaps the most important development humankind ever made because it allowed people to keep a more reliable record of information for future generations so we could learn from the past and society could evolve and flourish.

Giovanni Battista della Porta first describing the camera obscura in a book seems another seminal moment because "a picture tells a thousand words" isn't a saying for nothing. Photos allow up to see into the past and that is surely as important as written word because photos provide stories and information that can be understood across the worlds language barriers.

Another major development would have to be the first Newspaper ever created in Germany, 1609 A.D. Newspapers are a way to dispense important information to large amounts of people and they are still used for that very purpose today, which demonstrates the importance of this development in communication history.

The invention of the first telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 was a miraculous thing indeed because it allowed people to truly communicate over large distances, something that couldn't really be achieved through written letters or telegraphs because when we speak it's not just facts and figures that we exchange it's also emotions that we convey in the way we speak.

Lastly I'm going to list the World Wide Web because it's become such an essential part of how most of the world lives. Growing up in a developed country I cannot even comprehend not having the Internet available to me, I use it for the gathering of information, communication, entertainment and the general management of my life.