Jargogled Impressions.

Allegedly, we have evolved in lock-step and often aided by our need to communicate. Our words have shaped us, continue to shape us, more than we let on, much more than we realize.

Words have the power to hurt, to defeat, to rejoice, to entertain, to excite, to motivate, to startle, to arouse, and so much more. Words are the symbolic representations of our emotional world. The words we use make who we are. The communication we transmit to the world outside of us, becomes the fabric of our existence.

When we communicate effectively, we do so because we did it at the right time, in the right moment, within the right interval, through the right modality, in the right language, and with the right candor and tone. There are a lot of elements involved with this most basic of human activity. In fact, the more sophisticated our world becomes and its adoption of complex languages, the more difficult it becomes for us to strike the right balance for communicating with entities, including, unsurprisingly, with ourselves.

Someone reiterated an oft-used aphorism to me the other day – we should ship products, not our org chart. I have heard this one before, never used it myself. But it’s sort of layman speak for Conway’s Law. The law focuses on the communication structure of organizations, which is, to a large extent, driven by its organizational structure. So, the chain of causation is, that the organizational structure drives communication structure which results in the past and future evolution of the product. It is typically used for software products but I think that’s because its’ easier to observe and measure for software versus hardware products. How employees communicate matters, if the organization intends to ship high-quality, aesthetic, beautiful products.

A part of me believes that the innovator’s dilemma is largely a communication problem. As the degrees of separation increase between the decision makers and the minions, the communication breaks down. Without the exact right culture, it’s a breakdown that is hard to counteract. And that’s why we see larger, legacy enterprises at some point seceded by nimble, transparent, agile, more modern tool-using upstarts.

There’s a large software market of startups selling to startups. And it makes sense because startups can move fast, and need tools that move alongside them. The tools reflect that. It’s hard to compete with a cloud-native company when you started your digital journey in the mainframe era. It will be hard to compete with an AI-native company for some of today’s biggest vendors. The paranoia that this instills in these enterprises is what drives up the investments in these modern technologies and the subsequent momentum in the ecosystem, resulting in a sort of own-goal for the incumbents. Anyways, the modern-day tools that the startups use are dramatically more advanced than what enterprises can infuse through programs and manpower. And they serve different marketing, finance, research, workflow, and compute needs. But mostly, they serve to narrow down the communication barrier so things can continue to move fast even as these startups scale and start competing with the bigger players. Isn’t all b2b software tools effectively a way to manage and steer and clarify communication between various stakeholders?

Ancient hominids communicated asynchronously via hieroglyphs. But what did they communicate about? Telling stories, entertaining themselves, or warning each other. I guess the intent has not changed since then. Only modes and the symbols we use have. And we have more terms we can use, more mediums we can leverage, more words to trip over, more emotions we have names for. Where has all this sophistication in our communication led us into? For one, we are making human ‘progress’ like a blitzkrieg. And advances in communication is a key factor, right? From printing press to the telegraph, the telephone to the television, from the dial-up modem to the iPhone, from classifieds to social media.  The leaps we took to communicate effectively drove the sceniuses that drove the wide dissemination of ideas and compounding of them in turn which led to the breakthroughs.

I wonder what the Discord servers or Reddit rabbit holes or the Slack channels or the YouTube sub-cultures are going to seep next, or whatever it is that is going to be preferred mode of communication for the coming generations.

What sci-fictional examples of what the future of communication comes to mind?

This is a pretty neat list Dictionary of Communication Terms in Science Fiction with examples such as a babel fish (Google Translate?) to Cosmic Teletype to Discorporaphone. The Quantum Entanglement communication in The Three Body Problem enabled instantaneous communication over vast distances. Snow Crash from Neal Stephenson was a precursor to the excitement around augmented/virtual reality where communication merges with the real-world like alchemy.

We have made such advances in communication, and yet the most simple, profound ones remain with the ones we love and the most complex ones remain with the ones we care about and share our life journey with. The depth of information baked in shared memories is enormous. Hidden behind the crannies of our brain, waiting to be surfaced with the most strange and bizarre triggers. And with it comes the need for communication, to remember, to message that we remember, to care, to message that we care, to empathize, to listen and empathize.

We can communicate all we want, using whatever tools we need. But the most effective one may just be to be present. Present in the moment, present with someone, present in their lives, present with our happiness, present with our sadness, present with our dreams, and present with our breath.  It’s harder than it sounds. Deceptive in its simplicity. But bakes in that presence is a mode of communication that is as old as earth itself. The trees are just present there, in their age-old glory. They communicate too, via their secretions, the rustle of the leaves, the swaying of the branches, the creakiness of their sways. It’s there, waiting for someone to catch their communications, and revel, in its patient undertaking.