Communication, what is it?

David Raan

AS ICT

Communication

Communication, what is it? Is it looking at someone in the flesh and speaking to them? Is it picking up the telephone and talking to someone who you know? Is it turning on your home computer and socialising with a complete stranger from the other side of the world through a keyboard? The definitions in the dictionary are as follows; imparting information given, intercourse, access or means of access, passage, and connection between places. The definition that I choose to use is ‘access or means of access’; communication is basically access to anything and everything you want. It is the key we all need to open the doors of life, without it we are nothing, without it the world we live in would be nothing. We need communication to survive. As you are aware those sentences are no exaggeration, with this in mind you will realise that communication is extremely important in the world we live in. But why is it so important, how can you use it to its fullest and what issues surround its fairly recent advancement? These are the questions that I hope to evaluate in this essay you are about to read.

I will focus on modern technological forms of communication, as this is the type that affects us most. We live in an age where almost everyone has several forms of communication to choose from. We can use mobile phones, beepers, PDA’s, fax machines and email along with many more specialised methods. Phones are a very important part of most people’s lives, especially recently where we have seen an enormous increase in mobile phone ownership, they are an excellent example of modern technology being used to store, send and process information. You can send text messages to all mobile phones and also store a reasonable amount of information such as phone numbers, ring tones and pictures etc. Now most phones are WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) enabled, allowing the user to surf the Worldwide Web as you would with a PC (Personal Computer), this is made possible by a small modem inside the handset. Users are able to view WAP compatible sites to find out useful information such as news, sports results and cinema listings. Teletext is a similar service but is broadcasted through television signals and is not interactive, faxes are sent down a telephone line, you are able to send pages of text or graphics and they arrive at your destination as quickly as email. All the mentioned channels are without a doubt very useful, but one we haven’t discussed is the Internet, it is by far the most successful and popular choice of this generation and I will for the rest of this essay review it thoroughly.

This is a preview of the whole essay

It all started in 1957 when the American Government first set up an extremely basic system, which used a computer the size of a large refrigerator. Since then however there have been steady advancements, it was in 1971 that Computer Meditated Communication (CMC) was first used in real time, this proved to be an Internet milestone. Electronic mail and file transfer protocol were developed in the earliest stages of what would later be known as the Internet. I t was not until 1990 that the Worldwide Web truly became alive and we owe thanks to none other than a Swiss born researcher, using cursor movement arrows on a keyboard, users could employ a program called Lynx to locate documents and make hyper jumps between them. To further this, another program was designed in 1993, it was called Mosaic and it provided a graphical interface for the World Wide Web, the designers would later create Netscape communications which proved to be a major competitor in the internet software market. From then on in (give or take 3 years), thing started to happen very fast, all the required pieces of the jigsaw were in place, the growth of the internet and everything remotely related to it spread at a phenomenal rate. Now, a few years on, the Internet has not slowed in its growth, it is safe to say that there are very few on the face of this earth that do not have some kind of access to an online computer. It is because of this that it has turned into a multi-billion pound business, every company has to be online to thrive. As the World Wide Web becomes more advanced, and improvements are made in the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) upon which it is based, new uses are blurring the lines between the World Wide Web and other Internet technologies. Some pages allow users to send and receive email or order products online while others allow web based chat between users. Internet shopping is extremely successfully; it allows users to view and order products and pay for them with their credit cards over a secure connection, the item is then delivered straight to the home of the user, this effort free service is exactly what makes the Internet thrive. People are now able to participate in real time CMC, although this is an ‘old trick’, internet chat along with many other features, such as electronic mail and file transfer protocol, have all been buffed up to appeal to the new generation of internet users. It is now quite possible to play complex computer games with several others through your Internet connection, games far more advanced than Roy Trubshaws Multiple User Dungeon (A game which was revolutionary decades ago). Users of the Internet have access to downloadable music, software and films, this is not to the delight of the respective industries however. Users are able to download anything for no charge, it is mostly illegal but that does not deter many, the result is music, film and software companies having a large portion of their profits slashed. Video conferencing is a vital form of communication for many businesses, it allows face to face meetings to take place without the participants being in the same room. For this you would need highly efficient computers, sound cards, cameras, compression cards, specialist software and modem connection, unless all these components are present it is extremely difficult to transmit such large amounts of data. Another mentioned feature of the Internet, credit card payment, is also occasionally troublesome; credit card fraud has rocketed since the introduction of online shopping, funds from a users bank account can quite easily be extracted once card details have been given.