Truncating Communication via Space Travel

            “Splashdown successful!! Sending fast boat to lat/long provided by P3 tracking planes #Dragon.” – @elonmusk

            This Tweet changes many things. It changes the way we look at the future of space travel and exploration. It changes our perspective on what is possible once the individual endeavors to excel where the governing institution resigns to irrelevance and extinction in matters of exploration and discovery. Most importantly: it changes everything about the way we communicate.

            If you pay attention to technology and science trends (and how can you not in this day and age?) you probably know Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) put their flagship rocket, Dragon, into orbit last week. It delivered its payload to the international space station then completed re-entry yesterday, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean not too far off the coast of California.

            You might find yourself asking: “How does the future of private space exploration change the way we communicate?” Well, let me explain. It isn’t really the space exploration; it’s the Tweet. This transformative platform of communication isn’t exactly new. Twitter, SMS messaging, and Facebook have contributed significantly to this new paradigm. What I see as the impetus for future dissemination of information is that we’ve surrendered to this hyper-truncated method of communication. Complex thoughts, data, and emotion need to fit in 140 characters. This means conveyance is shifting towards rapid-fire exchanges of 0.14kb of data or less. Given the volumes of data we now handle on a daily basis, this seems, perhaps, miniscule.

            Take it one step deeper with me. To understand the Tweet at the beginning of this post, one needs to have an encompassing awareness of many trends and events for the context of the Tweet to make any sense. For most of us, this comes through our array of RSS feeds, hardcopy or digital newspapers, or word of mouth. Hold that thought for just a second: word of mouth? Whereas this predominantly shaped our means and method of communication of news for several centuries (post, social gossip, town crier), the advent of newspapers shifted that transference of information into high gear. The parturition of the Internet took that from high gear into interdimensional overdrive. I have to pause here for a moment, because I can only think of Spaceballs when Rick Moranis takes “Spaceball One” from ridiculous to ludicrous speed and says, “My brains are going into my feet!” That scene succinctly captures the feeling of what we face—word of mouth becoming near instantaneous, pan-global awareness in 140 bytes or less.

Twitter’s enmeshed use of the hash mark (#) and the ampersand (@) as identifying classes for objects, ideas, and persons is not groundbreaking. Anyone who has spent time developing with or learning an object-oriented programming language has experiential familiarity with these codifications. The uniqueness lies in the crossover from the cold, digital cyberworld into the neurobiological wetware of the human brain’s left hemisphere. We find ourselves trying to adapt to the staggering volume of information coming in; and in so doing, we’ve created shortcuts to navigate the cybersphere that cross-correlate to classifying identifiers in our own minds. This psychological matrix, to survive in the digital future, finds it necessary to produce routines and algorithms unique to each individual to keep pace with the data, events, and ideas coming in on all fronts.

Two years ago, I spent a semester teaching expository writing to college sophomores. I didn’t quite suspect it then, as I do now, but I knew we stood on the precipice of a huge shift in the linguistic structure of our verbal and written communication systems. When I discovered the first “u” as replacement for “you” in an academic paper, I was furious. It undermined the whole system of grammar and attention to language I fostered as truth just as a priest wields a Bible like a cudgel. However, I now see and accept this transition and shift in communication as inevitable. Just a few days ago, I was reading through an old historical record on the history of Witchcraft in the British Empire during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Middle and Old English seem foreign languages in comparison to modern American or British English. Inevitably, future variations and linguistic aberrations will manifest, so the English of as little as five to ten years from now will in no way be recognizable. How else will we keep pace with complex communiqués in 140 bytes or less?