Communicate at the Speed of Light

Here we are in the age of interactions, the time of cell phones, computers, PDAs and social media. And the almighty Internet looms overhead, possible even through this post. Even though as a small boy I had a hard time understanding what all the fuss was about, and what this “Internet” everyone kept talking about was, I soon grew to understand that it meant more than games and looking at pictures until late at night.

And the moment I figured this out was when I started taking an interest in history, and learned about the sketchy beginnings of electricity, and about Graham Bell's telephone, and about how all these inventions seemed to somehow correlate to the way our world looks today. Because, there's no doubt about it, without the vision of some really outstanding individuals we wouldn't be able today to browse the Web at will, and learn in 20 minutes information that our parents spent their entire life working out.

Moreover, remember the old way of communicating, when news would reach their receiver about 2 or 3 days after they were sent, that is provided the two people communicating were in the same country. For a trip from Europe to India, letters took as long as six months to be delivered, which really left little time for important decisions to be made. Most often, deliverymen would ride on horses for more than 48 hours, often giving their lives to bandits, as they did so.

Later, smoke signals were used to relay warnings from mountaintop to mountaintop, but no one could exactly send a love story that way. At the end of the 18th century, people were still using horses most of the time, yet the visual telegraph had already been invented. In this system, visual signals were transmitted from one tower to another over distances of 10 to 30 kilometers. This was very expensive to do, and required a large number of skilled operators and carefully-calibrated towers. Eventually, it gave way to the electric version, which suddenly made everything affordable, and infinitely faster.

When I read such accounts, I often try to imagine what life must have been like in the old days. I mean, even today, we feel a little bit off-guard when electricity goes out for a little while. Nevertheless, after one or two days, we really start seeing the disadvantages – no refrigerated food, no heating, no music, no computers, no telephones, and so on. And, no matter how much we would like to say that they are just commodities, in truth they are not. In fact, they are the things that define us as a society.

And perhaps the most important detail about us is that we can now communicate at a time of our choice. This is no longer a privilege reserved only to noblemen or reach people, it's something that even a 6 or 7 year-old can do, and with great proficiency, at that. We can choose to leave a comment for a friend's photo about three minutes after he or she posted it online, or we can opt to make a call to someone halfway around the globe at a moment's notice, if the situation demands it.

And this is what drives our world today. It's the root of everything we are. It's not the economy that has created this standard of life for us, but our ability to come together and understand each other completely. In fact, it was the economy that relied on communications in order to progress. Imagine the stock exchange today without mobile phones. All the transactions made in a day would become obsolete by the next one, and the cash flow would generate no profit to speak of.

Phenomena such as globalization would totally lose their meaning without the presence of the Internet, which currently allows for the entire capital of a firm to be transferred between several countries in a single day. And, as such, profits would be approximately the same as they were centuries ago. Furthermore, without the Internet, there would have probably been far less computers in the world, if the possibility of instant communication between them was nowhere on sight.

I don't know if you have ever experienced this, but each time the Internet connection goes down, and you get stuck with only what you have on hard drives, it seems so little. When I sit at night in front of my PC and turn it on, I feel like I am instantly connected to almost everyone. And it's not just my friends, whom I also meet socially with. But, for example, I see a scientist on TV, and, by only using his or her name, I can learn about their work, and even contact them. And, naturally, no one replies all the time, but at least you have the possibility to try. Obviously, that is one of the most amazing things about our world today.