Describe the history of communication and how it has been important to great civilizations through the modern day, and the concept of the "global village."

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The hallmark of great civilizations has been their great systems of communications. In the beginning, communications was based on transportation: the Roman Empire had its network of roads, as did other ancient civilizations, such as the Incas. Later the great European powers had their far-flung navies. In the 19th century, the United States and Canada unified North America by building transcontinental railroads. Later the airplane reduced travel time between continents.

Transportation began to yield to the electronic exchange of information. Beginning in 1844, the telegraph ended the short existence of the Pony Express and, beginning in 1876, found itself in competition with the telephone. The amplifying vacuum tube, invented in 1906, led to commercial radio. Television came into being in England in 1925. During the 1950s and 1960s, as television exploded throughout the world, communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan posed the notion of a "global village," which refers to the "shrinking" of time and space as air travel and the electronic media have made it easier for the people of the globe to communicate with one another.

Then the world became even faster and smaller. Fifteen years ago, cell phones, pagers, fax, and voice-mail links barely existed. Then came the Internet, the worldwide computer-linked "network of networks," of which there were an estimated 1.7 billion users throughout the world in late 2000. The arrival of the Web quickly led to e-commerce, or electronic commerce, the buying and selling of products and services through computer networks.