The Devolution of Conversation

When I messaged my son yesterday to ask if he wanted dinner tonight, instead of receiving a well-structured, grammatically correct, English sentence... I was sent a picture of Chuck Norris sticking his thumbs up.

Despite all the many advances in written conversations we somehow seem to be going backwards…

Pictures and simple one way communications

We start our journey around 45,000 years ago, when a lonely caveman (caveperson?) drew a picture of an antelope on a cave wall. This is the earliest recorded Instagram equivalent of sharing what you ate for dinner with a friend. These early one-to-few communications had limited content, limited reach and were very one way.

We move on from the cave drawings after a few thousand years when soldiers guarding the Great Wall of China started using smoke signals to communicate with their mates when it was time to clock off and head to the tavern. These one-to-few communications reached a bit further and allowed for (slow) replies - but were very binary in their content.

Around 2,500 years ago our conversations got a bit more interesting when carrier pigeons appeared on the scene. For the first time we could share a couple of sentences of information with a peer, but the pigeons were not keen on carrying much more. Messages had to be crafted carefully, could take days or weeks to arrive, and - unless you had an abundance of pigeons - conversations were difficult.

Electronic messaging brings too much content

The electric telegraph arrived in the 18th Century allowing us to ask a question using morse code, and receive an answer - in the same day!

Speedy conversations exploded in the late 20th century with the introduction of emails. We were able to send long conversations, with text and images, anywhere in the world, immediately and for free! But as Spiderman says – with great power comes great responsibility and people quickly found ways to abuse this power. Just a few years after its invention, the first “spam” email was sent. Nowadays emails are a necessary evil, used daily for almost everything we do at home and at work. But because of the barrage of noise, we no longer rush to reply making it less effective for conversations.

Simple messaging enables rapid conversations

Now our story takes a turn. No sooner can we send unlimited content, at the speed of light, we realise this isn't necessarily what we need.

In the late 1990s SMS brought us crashing back to short form conversations. Instead of writing an essay, single sentences were in fashion again. Conversations over SMS were quick and cheap, and anyone with a mobile phone could access them.

When SMS was first launched you were charged per 160 characters. Short form SMS was invented, and our language skills quickly declined. No longer did we laugh out loud, instead we LOL’d and we ROFL’d… IYKWIM.

Emojis, memes and gifs a caveman would be proud of

As everyone became connected to the internet, a whole wave of instant messenger apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and WeChat followed SMS allowing visual content to be shared.

Which brings us back to the start again. Despite the advances we’ve seen in how quickly and cheaply we can have conversations, instant messaging allowed the content of those conversations to return to caveman era pictures. Nowadays, instead of writing out conversations we send memes, emojis, and gifs to express ourselves more readily than words ever could.

At ContactEngine we are using RCS (Rich Communication Services) to communicate with consumers. As RCS becomes more widely available we will be able to use images in our conversation to improve the consumer experience.

So, all that remains to ask is… ???